Pre-Raphaelites Exhibitions

The 19th-Century Shift · c. 1848–1860

Medieval colour, modern scandal

Seven young Londoners, Rossetti and Millais among them, formed a secret brotherhood in 1848 to reject everything taught at the Royal Academy since Raphael. They painted onto wet white ground to get colours of almost hallucinatory intensity, took their models from the street rather than the studio, and filled biblical and literary scenes with obsessive botanical detail. Dickens called the results blasphemous. Ruskin defended them, and within a decade they had changed British painting.