Collection: Pre-Raphaelites & Symbolism

The Pre-Raphaelites and Symbolism cover two related strands of late nineteenth century painting that shared an investment in literary subject matter, decorative line, and a deliberate rejection of academic Salon convention. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in London in 1848 by seven English artists: William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens, and Thomas Woolner.

The Brotherhood objected to what they called the mechanistic approach that British academic painting had inherited from the late Renaissance through the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds. They championed a return to the abundant detail, intense colour, and complex compositions of early Italian and Flemish painting, applying bright pigments over white grounds to obtain a jewel-like transparency. Their first exhibitions in 1849 generated public controversy, particularly Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents.

The formal Brotherhood dissolved by 1853, but its influence expanded. Rossetti led a medievalising second phase that ran through Edward Burne-Jones and the design work of William Morris, fed directly into the Arts and Crafts movement, and shaped the late Victorian Aesthetic and Symbolist current. John William Waterhouse belongs to this later phase, applying a softer late Victorian idiom to mythological and Tennysonian subjects.

Continental Symbolism developed in parallel from the 1880s onward, sharing the British commitment to literary, mythological, and dream subjects. Its principal figures were Gustave Moreau and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes in France, Odilon Redon, Fernand Khnopff in Belgium, and Arnold Böcklin in Switzerland. The movement prepared the conditions for full Art Nouveau decoration and for the Vienna Secession around Gustav Klimt.