Collection: Pre-Raphaelites & Symbolism

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in London in 1848 by seven young artists, three of whom remained the movement's defining figures: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt. They named themselves against Sir Joshua Reynolds and the academic tradition that, in their reading, had begun with Raphael's later work. Their counter programme called for return to the bright colour, sharp detail, and direct moral seriousness they associated with fifteenth century Italian and Flemish painting.

The first Pre-Raphaelite phase, broadly 1848 to 1853, produced an intense small body of work, often biblical or Shakespearean, painted out of doors with botanical specificity and saturated colour. Hunt continued in this vein for decades, travelling to Palestine in pursuit of documentary truth for religious subjects. Millais moved toward a looser society portraiture. Rossetti turned in the opposite direction, building an interior idiom of literary, mediaeval, and mythological subjects centred on a few obsessive female sitters.

That Rossettian register opened the second phase of the movement, sometimes called the Aesthetic or Symbolist Pre-Raphaelite, which extended through Edward Burne-Jones and the design work of William Morris into the 1880s and 1890s. John William Waterhouse belongs to this later phase, working its mythological and Tennysonian subjects into a softer late Victorian style. European Symbolism developed in parallel, sharing the same investment in dream, allegory, and literary source material.

The prints gathered here include reproductions of major paintings, illustrated editions, and decorative work from the Morris circle. The collection sits between the gallery's Romanticism & Classical Landscapes holdings, the immediate background, and the Art Nouveau & Belle Époque selection, the international decorative idiom into which late Pre-Raphaelitism flowed.