Can we ever get enough of the Pre-Raphaelites, their lives, loves, and art? It seems not.
Pre-Raphaelites
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Looking Beyond the “Brotherhood” of the Pre-Raphaelites
Concurrent shows at the Delaware Art Museum highlight overlooked aspects of Pre-Raphaelite art and tread beyond typical gender hierarchies.
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Aubrey Beardsley’s Self-Conscious Depiction of Degeneration
Although Beardsley was foremost a decorative illustrator, he depicted the physically monstrous and assorted polymorphous perversities.
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Pre-Raphaelite Women Don’t Quite Get Their Due
While Pre-Raphaelite Sisters does write the female characters of the Pre-Raphaelite era into art history, it falls short by relegating these talented artists to the roles of lover and muse.
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The Multiple Personae in Edward Burne-Jones’s Paintings
The Pre-Raphaelite artist mixed horror and decadence to create a feeling of unnaturalness.
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Using Mirrors to See van Eyck Reflected in the Pre-Raphaelites
This exhibition demonstrates Van Eyck’s influence on the Pre-Raphaelite through visual comparisons which satisfyingly reveal a complex relationship between two otherwise disparate art movements.
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Letters Between Dante Gabriel Rossetti and His Model Fanny Cornforth Are Now Online
The Delaware Art Museum has digitized correspondence between the Pre-Raphaelite painter and his overlooked muse.
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Memorializing the Forgotten Grave of a Pre-Raphaelite Muse
Fanny Cornforth has one of the most recognizable faces of Pre-Raphaelite art, yet after dying at an asylum in obscurity, she rests in an unmarked grave.
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The Secret Victorian Language of Flowers
The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened an exhibition on the Pre-Raphaelites of the 19th century last week, with 30 pieces showing wistful figures in draped clothing often surrounded with flowers. But while the floral touches might seem like colorful accents to us, to Victorians there was a language in the flowers.
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Conservators Uncover Collaborative Pre-Raphaelite Mural
Conservators have discovered an entire wall painting done by five Pre-Raphaelite artists in a house in a London suburb. The building, known as the Red House, was the home of Arts and Crafts movement founder William Morris between 1860 and 1865; sometime during those years, Morris completed the painting in collaboration with artists Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal (Rossetti’s wife), and Ford Madox Brown.
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Pre-Raphaelites With Guns
When Italian revolutionaries made an assassination attempt on Napoleon III in 1858, and it turned out that they’d been refugees in Great Britain, the British looked at their outnumbered army and rightly wondered if they should beef up their forces in comparison to the enraged French. One of these volunteer regiments came from an unlikely group: the Pre-Raphaelite painters.
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Shock of the Old: The Pre-Raphaelites Go Back to the Future
In its first iteration in London, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, the survey now on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, bore the edgier title Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde. We may not customarily think of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) — founded in secret in September 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and soon attracting other artists — as an avant-garde, but the label does seem apt. The PRB painters and their affiliated artists were an embattled band of refuseniks, rejecting the standard practices of modern painting, and with it modernity itself, as corrupt and unsustainable.
