Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

In September 1848, painters William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti formed a secret society in London — the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood — signing early works with the cryptic initials "PRB." Reacting against the Royal Academy's veneration of Raphael and the formulaic history painting it produced, the group looked instead to the sincerity and detail of art before Raphael, guided by critic John Ruskin's doctrine of "truth to nature." Their early works, including Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents (1850), scandalized critics such as Charles Dickens for treating sacred subjects with unflinching realism, but Ruskin's public defense in The Times turned the tide. The original Brotherhood effectively dissolved by 1853 once Millais was elected to the Royal Academy, but a second generation soon emerged: Rossetti met Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris at Oxford in 1857, extending Pre-Raphaelite ideals from painting into poetry, textiles, and decorative arts through Morris & Co. This phase leaned toward myth, medieval romance, and sensuous female archetypes, and helped incubate the Aesthetic and Symbolist movements. Though dismissed for decades as sentimental Victoriana, the Pre-Raphaelites are now recognized as Britain's first self-consciously avant-garde movement — artists who organized, published manifestos, and deliberately provoked the establishment, prefiguring the strategies of twentieth-century modernism.