The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of England

The Pre-Raphaelite movement, which at one time threatened the very foundations of Art in England, ended in being the most futile attempt at a revolution ever recorded in the intellectual world. The talent and earnestness of its originators gave it notoriety, but as each member became absorbed in his own individual art-expression, the "Brotherhood" died a natural death. Yet some very famous pictures are still marked "P. R. B." The leaders of the movement were John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; and with these three youths were afterward associated Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, and and others. The meaning of the true title and the true principle that lay at the root of the movement sprung from a weariness of old and conventional types and methods of Art. When told to look to Michael Angelo and Raphael as guides, they began to ask: "To whom did these look?" They then instituted a search for the predecessors of the artists of the sixteenth century, calling themselves "the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood." They were poets as well as painters; they cultivated oddity, and ended by being quite as exaggerated and affected in style and treatment as the old conventional Masters whom they ignored. It is a good thing to go back to Nature, and to copy even her stones correctly, but the Pre-Raphaelites soon abandoned their peculiar realism, and, later, clothed their subjects with the beauty of a high ideal, endeavoring to lead their followers into "a presence greater and better than themselves." The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood did not long exist, but the vigorous attempts of these young artists to take Art back to her true mother, Nature, effected great and lasting good.