Seven young rebels named themselves after art before Raphael
In 1848, Millais, Rossetti, Hunt and four friends founded a secret Brotherhood in London, scorning Raphael's "corrupting" elegance and Joshua Reynolds as "Sir Sloshua." Their wet-white glazes sought Quattrocento jewel color—until Dickens branded Millais's Holy Family as slum drunks.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood formed in 1848 at John Everett Millais's parents' house on Gower Street. Its seven founders were William Holman Hunt, Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, plus William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens, and sculptor Thomas Woolner—loosely inspired by the Nazarenes. They wanted Quattrocento detail, intense color, and complex composition, rejecting Mannerist mechanics after Raphael and Michelangelo and Royal Academy teaching shaped by Reynolds. William Michael Rossetti defined "sloshy" as lax, scamped, commonplace painting. Early doctrines urged attentive study of Nature, sympathy with direct heartfelt earlier art, and thoroughly good pictures. Medieval fascination clashed with realist observation; later the movement split between Hunt–Millais realism and Rossetti's medieval romance, though both opposed Courbet-style materialist realism. Hunt and Millais glazed thin pigment over wet white grounds for transparency, reacting against bitumen's muddy darkness in Reynolds, Wilkie, and Haydon.
First shows came in 1849—Millais's Isabella and Hunt's Rienzi at the Academy, Rossetti's Girlhood of Mary Virgin at a Free Exhibition—all signed with "PRB." The Germ, edited by William Rossetti (January–April 1850), briefly broadcast their poetry and essays. Controversy erupted in 1850 over Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents; Charles Dickens called Mary ugly (modeled on Mary Hodgkinson) and likened the Holy Family to alcoholics in contorted medieval poses. Collinson resigned; the group could not agree on a replacement and effectively disbanded, though influence continued without the initials. John Ruskin defended them in The Times, then tangled personally when Effie Gray's unconsummated marriage to Ruskin was annulled and she married Millais—after which Millais loosened his style and Ruskin attacked later work while still backing Hunt, Rossetti, and Elizabeth Siddal.
By 1853 only Hunt still chased original aims, yet "Pre-Raphaelite" stuck to Rossetti, William Morris, and Edward Burne-Jones. Rossetti's femme fatales with Jane Morris fed Morris's firm and the Arts and Crafts medieval revival; Hunt pursued biblical sites in Egypt and Palestine. The short Brotherhood became a long stylistic afterlife.
Source: Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
