Pre-Raphaelite

Description

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a small group of British painters who founded a secret society in 1848 to oppose the loose, idealized academic tradition descended from Raphael. They wanted to return to the bright color, sharp detail, and earnest moral subjects of fifteenth-century Italian and Flemish painting before Raphael. Their work and a second generation of Pre-Raphaelite painters defined a strain of Victorian visual culture that remains intensely popular. Visual rules: hyper-detail across the entire frame, foreground and background equally rendered — no atmospheric softening; saturated jewel-tone color from a new generation of synthetic pigments (1840s chemistry made bright greens, deep purples, and intense blues available); precise botanical and textile rendering, often with symbolic meaning attached to each plant; long-haired women modeled on a small recurring cast of sitters; literary and mythological subjects drawn from Shakespeare, Dante, and medieval romance; compositions that emphasize the vertical and the iconographic. Use it for fantasy illustration with literary anchoring, gothic-romantic editorial, Victorian-period imagery, mythological and biblical scenes, and any image where a long-haired woman in a jeweled gown stands waist-deep in flowering water (sorry, this is the joke about the style). Models will produce "Victorian painting" mush. Specify "Pre-Raphaelite, hyper-detailed foreground and background equally rendered, jewel-tone saturated color with 1840s synthetic pigments, precise botanical and textile detail, long-haired female sitter, literary or Arthurian subject, drowned-heroine-in-a-stream or personified-grief-portrait reference."