The Pre-Raphaelites – Roxanne Eberle

The Hireling Shepherd (William Holman Hunt, 1851)

Distinctive features of Pre-Raphaelite Poetry and Painting (Accessed 3 March 2015 <http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/prb/1.html>)

Testing and defying all conventions of art; for example, if the Royal Academy schools taught art students to compose paintings with (a) pyramidal groupings of figures, (b) one major source of light at one side matched by a lesser one on the opposite, and (c) an emphasis on rich shadow and tone at the expense of color, the PRB with brilliant perversity painted bright-colored, evenly lit pictures that appeared almost flat.
The PRB also emphasized precise, almost photographic representation of even humble objects, particularly those in the immediate foreground (which were traditionally left blurred or in shade) –thus violating conventional views of both proper style and subject.
Following Ruskin, they attempted to transform the resultant hard-edge realism (created by 1 and 2) by combining it with typological symbolism. At their most successful, the PRB produced a magic or symbolic realism, often using devices found in the poetry of Tennyson and Browning.
Believing that the arts were closely allied, the PRB encouraged artists and writers to practice each other’s art, though only D.G. Rossetti did so with particular success.
Looking for new subjects, they drew upon Shakespeare, Keats, and Tennyson

From the headnote to Dante Gabriel Rossetti: “Pre-Raphaelitism was identified with a vivid palette, formal patterning, and symbolic details woven into exotic scenes of religious or romantic love whose settings evoked sumptuous “elsewhere.” In Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting, there was always a “definiteness of sensible imagery,’ as [Walter] Pater said of ‘The Blessed Damozel'” (BABL B 824-825)

Images for Class Discussion: