The Pre-Raphaelites

Meet the renegades of Victorian art in this gorgeously illustrated exploration of their work and influence.

In the revolutionary year of 1848, a group of young British artists set out to return a lost vibrancy to European art. Calling themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, they mounted an artistic front against what they saw as the confining standards of the Victorian art world, and the dehumanising aspects of the industrial age. Among their ranks were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Hunt, who found followers in Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. Their works drew from Shakespeare, Keats, and Tennyson. They also depicted religious and contemporary themes in striking realism, bringing viewers into intimate contact with the subjects and causing scandal in their time.

In her authoritative yet readable text, author Aurelie Petiot traces pre-Raphaelitist from its beginnings in a secret brotherhood, to its dissemination into multiple strands of English art. Later chapters provide fresh insight into the Pre-Raphaelite influence on subsequent movements as Arts & Crafts and French Modernism, as well as contemporary pop culture.

Collected in this handsome volume are over 300 full-colour illustrations featuring all the great Pre-Raphaelite masterpieces, as well as many fascinating lesser-known works. Each painting has been reproduced with the luminous brilliance and detail for which the Pre-Raphaelites were known. This book is a must-have for any art history lover.

About the Author

Aurelie Petiot, who studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure and received her PhD at the University of Cambridge, is a lecturer in art history at the Universite Paris Nanterre. An authority on nineteenth-century British art, Petiot has published her scholarship in such leading journals as the Burlington Magazine and the British Art Journal.