Impact of the Pre-Raphaelites

John Ruskin "...The foundation of a school of art nobler than the world has seen for 300 years."

The Royal Academy has had a profound influence on British art since its inception. After a hundred years of influence professors at its art schools demanded its painters standardize their technique

"... properly subjected to Raphaelesque rules, is to have a principal light occupying one seventh of its space, and a principal shadow occupying one third of the same; that no two people's heads in the picture are to be turned the same way, and that all the personages represented are to have ideal beauty of the highest order..."

according to the eminent contemporary artist, scientist, poet, environmentalist, philosopher, and art critic John Ruskin.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood aimed to return to a more genuine art, exemplified as they saw it by the work of the Nazarenes, and rooted in realism and truth to nature. Their ideas were that for every scene,

• a real unidealized landscape or interior should be painted,
• that every figure should be based on a real model with their real proportions,
• that the figures should be grouped without reference to any artistic arrangement, and
• that they should paint worthy subjects.

In other words, to avoid
"Cattle-pieces and sea-pieces and fruit-pieces and family-pieces, the eternal brown cows in ditches, and white sails in squalls, and sliced lemons in saucers, and foolish faces in simpers." (Ruskin)

What are the characteristics of the early Pre-Raphaelite paintings?

1. They are generally bright - much more so than contemporary academic pictures - painted on a white ground.
2. The "truth to nature" is apparent in attention to minute detail, to color, and sometimes a lack of grace in composition.
3. A taste for significant subjects - from medieval tales, from poetry, from religion.

They exhibited their work with the initials "P.R.B." (for Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) for a short while, and had a journal, The Germ, attracting much criticism, especially from Charles Dickens, before support from John Ruskin lead to their work being reconsidered in a more favourable light.

Later, founder Rossetti inspired a new, younger generation of artists to follow the romantic, medieval type of painting which he himself produced, and these are also called Pre-Raphaelites, and sometimes referred to as the second generation.

Illustration from Tennyson's Poems, published by Moxon in 1857

The Pre-Raphaelites also had a very important impact on book illustration from the middle of the 19th Century. This was not because of the number of illustrations that they produced, which was not large, but because they raised the craft of illustration to high art, and gave an inspiration to generations of future illustrators, some of whom continued to draw in the Pre-Raphaelite style long after painting had moved in other directions. These drawings were treated by the artists in the same painstaking way that they worked on oil paintings, with many studies and changes to each drawing, which was considered a work of art in its own right.

John Ruskin met the Pre-Raphaelites, he encouraged them in their ideals, acting as tutor, mentor, and generous supporter. Ruskin taught Pre-Raphaelite style drawing at the Working Men's College in London for some years, enlisting Rossetti to teach figure and watercolour painting and afterwards Ford Madox Brown to fill the same position. Afterwards, he left London, becoming Slade Professor of Art at Oxford (where there is an art college named after him) and then removing to the Lake District where he helped to start the Environmental Movement. There is a Ruskin Museum in Sheffield which has some of his sketches on permanent display.