Collection: Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in London in 1848 by seven young artists: William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens, and the sculptor Thomas Woolner. The group named itself against the academic tradition that, in their reading, had begun with Raphael's later work and the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds.

The Brotherhood's four founding principles, articulated by William Michael Rossetti, called for genuine ideas, attentive study of nature, sympathy with sincere previous art rather than convention, and the production of thoroughly good work. Their first phase, from 1848 to 1853, produced an intense small body of work: Hunt's The Light of the World, Millais's Ophelia and Christ in the House of His Parents, and Rossetti's Ecce Ancilla Domini. Their journal The Germ ran briefly in 1850.

The formal Brotherhood dissolved by 1853, but its influence expanded through associated and second-phase figures: Ford Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes, Henry Wallis, Frederic Sandys, Charles Allston Collins, Edward Burne-Jones, and John William Waterhouse. The decorative arts wing developed through William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement.