Expert: J Heuman - 10/23/2004

Question
Taking an interest course for old folks on the Pre-Raphaelites, several of us have been wondering just who wasn't a Pre-Raphaelite. The 7 original Brothers went their separate artistic ways after 1853, but we see lots and lots of other mid- and late-Victorian artists being labeled "Pre-Raphaelite."

Well enough, perhaps, for those in direct contact with the PRB, like Ford and Morris; maybe for later artists like Leighton and Alma-Tadema, but doesn't the term have any limits? Lady Butler, I read recently, was said to be the first Pre-Raphaelite painter of battle scenes. And Rossetti himself seems to have got away from the original strict standard of rigorous truth to nature.

Is there any generally accepted scheme or system for calling an artist Pre-Raphaelite, or did he term become all that blurred through overuse?

Answer
Greetings nb:


1848 marked the founding of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB).  Originally, there were seven artists (in alphabetical order):

          1. James Collinson;
          2. William Holman Hunt;
          3. John Everett Millais;
          4. Dante Gabriel Rossetti;
          5. William Michael Rossetti;
          6. Frederic George Stephens; and,
          7. Thomas Woolner.

Though the "movement" didn't last much beyond the 1850s, the style -- founded in oppostion to the domination of the art academies -- had become popular.  After all, independent artists who differed from the academic standard allied themselves with the PRB, even if (as you observe with Lady Butler) their styles contrasted raadically with the philosophy of the PRB founding members.

There was blurring of the lines as the PRB, the Arts & Craft Movement (William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, etc.); the Victorian Classicists (including Leighton, Alma-Tadema, and Solomon Joseph Solomon); and the Symbolists had a shared aesthetic -- a debt they all owed to Romanticism.

But, if you think about it, Impressionism was not dissimilar . . . as the original group was small (and sincere), but the style caught on, became popularized (and lost its sincerity), and has hundreds of imitators today.

[If my answer is satisfactory, I gladly invite further questions.]

Best wishes, sincerely,
J Heuman

P.S. It's rare for me to receive such an astute question.  Thank you!  :-)