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The Pre-Raphaelites Essay

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Pre-Raphaelites, a group made up of 19th-century English painters, poets, and critics who's work responded towards the practice of Victorian and neoclassical subject mater by developing bright imitations of religious work. More specifically, "and of the most beautiful are the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their followers, bright and clear colours, fair women and themes from myths and legends."(Darkamber 1). The groups source of inspiration came from early Renaissance painters and medieval times. This was up until the time of the famous, well known, Raphael. Raphael was an Italian painter who imitated his teachers work so carefully that it was very difficult to decipher the two. His work also entailed architecture as did …show more content…

"They wanted to free art from the stranglehold of the Academy"(Darkamber 1). The qualities encompassed in the PRB's work, singled them out from all other groups at the time. The Royal Academy criticized them for being artificial because the PRB broke away and started to write, paint and sculpt under their own requirements. "First, their paintings were generally bright. Second, they had to be true to nature. Third, they had to have a taste for a significant subject - from mediaeval tales, from poetry, from religion"(Mudhole 2).

Pre-Raphaelite literary work was compared to the romantic era, but "rejected the Romantic's Dioynisian side embodied by Lord Byron"(The Germ 2). Rossetti's earliest literary work appeared in the Germ, which was when the PRB received lots of criticism from Charles Dickens. The PRB, received a lot of heat from the public. "The criticism garnered by the PRB was often derogatory, aiming to ridicule their ‘backward’ aims in painting technique, or the triteness of their poems."(PR_Critic 1). The PRB was on the whole criticized negatively until John Ruskin came to the rescue. At the time. Ruskin was a proclaimed and established art critic so his word carried well. He spoke highly of this form of art that followed the truth of nature, of an art that was beautiful because it depicted what wasn't perfected or over-beatified. John Ruskin left the PRB with this passage:

'go to nature in all singleness of

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