Page 14 - History 2020

EPISODE 3: ENGLAND AS A GARDEN - THE RURAL IDYLL

The pre-Raphaelites - a presentation by Cathy Knight ; writers John Ruskin; William
Morris; reformers Ebenezer Howard, Octavia Hill; Martin Weiner and Declinism

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

By Cathy Knight

A Zoom presentation to Verwood U3A History Group, 22 September 2020

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) was founded in a house in London in 1848 by
seven rebellious young art students mainly from the Royal Academy (RA). The most
notable were William Homan Hunt (1827-1910), John Everett Millais (1826-96) and
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82). Ford Madox Brown (1821-1865) was closely
associated with the group but never formally became a member of the Brotherhood.
They represented a recent and controversial development in British Painting.

The name PRB is rather misleading because they did not advocate a return to the art
of the period before Raphael. This had already been done by a group of German
painters known as 'The Nazarenes' nearly half a century earlier. The declared aim of
the PRB was a 'return to nature' and a renunciation of the academic practices which
they traced back by way of Joshua Reynolds and the seventeenth-century Bolognese
school to the first imitators of Raphael. The name PRB was chosen, Hunt said, 'to
keep in our minds our determination ever to do battle against the frivolous art of the

day.'

In order to understand what may have triggered the forming of the PRB, it is first
necessary to examine the social and political conditions surrounding these students
when they were growing up and at the time of its subsequent formation.

Social revolution
It was a time of significant social change and a revolutionary atmosphere prevailed.
There had been the Peterloo Massacre in 1819 and the Reform Act of 1832 which
had given political power to the middle classes. Also the Chartist Petition of 1842
with over three million signatures and the demonstration on Kennington Common in
London in 1848 (some of the PRB witnessed this event). Karl Marx also published his
Communist Manifesto in 1848.

Furthermore it was also the time of the Industrial Revolution bringing with it mass

production and factory chimneys. The days of pride in individual craftsmanship were