The Pre-Raphaelites for beginners

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

In 1848, the year of revolutions, three young students at the Royal Academy in London formed a secret society. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and signed their paintings with the initials PRB. They wanted bright color, sharp detail and serious feeling, the qualities they saw in art before Raphael. What they started became one of the best-loved movements in British art, and one of the most important for witches, because it gave us so many of our enchantresses.

Three layers

Historical What the works and records show. Later tradition The legends around the circle. Modern How witches use their images today.

Truth to nature

Historical The Brotherhood was attacked at first, until the critic John Ruskin defended them in letters to The Times in 1851. They painted outdoors and in detail, leaf by leaf. Millais’s Ophelia (1851 to 1852), at Tate Britain, shows Shakespeare’s drowning heroine floating among flowers painted on the banks of a real river in Surrey. I describe it in words; the Tate website has it in high resolution. William Holman Hunt painted The Light of the World (1851 to 1853), now at Keble College, Oxford, with Christ knocking at an overgrown door by lantern light. He worked on it at night, outdoors, to get the moonlight right, and a later version toured the world.

Elizabeth Siddal

Historical Elizabeth Siddal modeled for Ophelia, lying for hours in a bath of water. She was also a painter and poet in her own right, encouraged by Ruskin, and she married Rossetti in 1860. She died in 1862. Too often she is remembered only as a face; I prefer to remember her own watercolors and poems.

Rossetti and Lady Lilith

Historical Rossetti painted Lady Lilith from 1866 to 1868, a woman combing her long hair before a mirror among flowers; it is now in the Delaware Art Museum, and the Met has a watercolor version. His sonnet for it, later called “Body’s Beauty”, makes her Adam’s first wife. I explore that story in the Lilith course.

Burne-Jones and the second wave

Sir Edward Burne-Jones, The Love Song, 1868 to 1877. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (47.26). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

Historical A second wave in the late 1850s included Edward Burne-Jones and his friend William Morris, who met as students at Oxford. Burne-Jones painted dreamy, long-limbed figures from legend. The Love Song, 1868 to 1877, at the Met, shows a knight, a woman playing a small organ and a winged figure in a twilight garden. It is a mood more than a story, which is exactly what he wanted. Burne-Jones also designed stained glass and tapestries for Morris’s firm, so his angels still glow in church windows across Britain.

The esoteric angle

Historical The Pre-Raphaelites painted enchantresses again and again: Morgan le Fay, Circe, Medea, the Lady of Shalott. John William Waterhouse, of the next generation, painted The Magic Circle in 1886: a woman draws a circle of fire around herself with a wand while ravens and a toad wait outside. In the same London decades, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded, in 1888, and artists and occultists moved in overlapping circles.

Later tradition The circle’s private lives became legends: Rossetti buried his poems with Siddal in 1862 and had them dug up in 1869. The story is true and often told with gothic relish.

Modern Many witches use Waterhouse’s sorceress as an image of a woman drawing her own boundaries. That is a modern reading, and one I share. See Witches in art.

Try it yourself

Pick one Pre-Raphaelite painting on the Tate website. Zoom in and list five plants or flowers you can identify. Then look up what one of them meant in Victorian flower language. Did the painter choose it on purpose?

Before and after

Before this: Romanticism.

After this: Realism.

See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.