The Pre-Raphaelites: How Millais, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones Changed Victorian Painting

Zocine Art
May 27
4 min read

Updated: Jun 23

In September 1848, seven young men met in a London studio and decided that English painting was finished. The dominant academies taught a manner descended from Raphael, with idealised figures, brown varnish, sentimental subjects. The seven painters, Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti among them, agreed that painting needed to go back before Raphael, to the bright colour, hard outline, and uncompromising detail of fifteenth-century Italian and Flemish art.

They called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Within four years they had broken the Victorian art world open. Within ten years they were the establishment. Within twenty they had reshaped how the English-speaking world looked at painting, poetry, and design. Here is the brief: what they did, who mattered, and where to start reading them today.

What made Pre-Raphaelite painting different

Three formal rules separate a Pre-Raphaelite painting from anything else painted in nineteenth-century Britain:

Outdoor painting, every blade of grass. The Brotherhood painted entire backgrounds outdoors, en plein air, with botanical precision. The leaves in Millais's Ophelia are identifiable to species. The Victorians had never seen this kind of naturalist insistence inside a narrative painting.
Saturated colour, white ground. Where the academic painters built up tone over brown underpainting, the Pre-Raphaelites painted onto a wet white ground that kept colours luminous. The result reads as digitally clean a century before the technology existed.
Literary subject, ordinary face. Pre-Raphaelite subjects came from Shakespeare, Dante, Tennyson, Arthurian legend. But the women modelling for the saints and queens were Rossetti's mistress Lizzie Siddal, his maid Fanny Cornforth, the seamstress Annie Miller. The Brotherhood collapsed high subject onto working-class face, which is partly why the Victorian critics screamed at them.

Millais: Ophelia (1851-1852)

The most reproduced Pre-Raphaelite painting and the formal manifesto of the movement. Millais painted the riverbank first, en plein air on the Hogsmill in Surrey, over five months. He then painted Lizzie Siddal floating in a bath in his London studio for four months. The water was kept warm by lamps under the tub. Every flower in the painting (willow, nettle, daisy, pansy, violet, forget-me-not, poppy) carries a symbolic meaning from Shakespeare or Victorian floriography. The painting hangs in a London collection today.

Rossetti: the stunners and the obsession

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was less interested in nature than the other two. He painted women (Lizzie Siddal, Jane Morris, Fanny Cornforth) over and over, in long-necked half-length portraits called 'stunners.' The faces are recognisable across dozens of paintings; the costumes change but the faces do not. Rossetti's painting is closer to icon than to Victorian portrait. He was reading thirteenth-century Italian poetry while painting and the influence shows. After Lizzie Siddal died in 1862, his work became darker, slower, and more obsessive. Proserpine, Beata Beatrix, Astarte Syriaca all carry her face.

Burne-Jones: the second generation

Edward Burne-Jones was not one of the original seven. He met Rossetti at Oxford in 1855 and absorbed Pre-Raphaelitism through him. By the 1870s, Burne-Jones had pulled the movement into a quieter, mythological register: tall pale figures in long robes, classical subjects, almost no colour saturation. His Golden Stairs (1880) and King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (1884) are the second-generation Pre-Raphaelite canon. He went on to design tapestries with William Morris and stained glass for English churches, and the design legacy of the movement runs through him.

Why the Victorian establishment screamed

Charles Dickens wrote a famous review in 1850 calling Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents (also known as The Carpenter's Shop) 'mean, odious, repulsive, and revolting,' because the Holy Family looked like an actual carpenter's family, with dirty feet and a real workshop floor. The Pre-Raphaelites refused to idealise. They painted Christ as a working-class boy. They painted the Virgin as a labouring woman. That was the political content of their formal naturalism: high subject does not deserve flattering treatment if the painter wants to be honest.

The afterlife: Aesthetic movement, Arts and Crafts, Symbolism

By 1870 the Brotherhood was dissolved as a group, but its influence had pulled English visual culture in three directions. (1) The Aesthetic Movement (Whistler, Wilde) borrowed the Pre-Raphaelite obsession with surface and beauty for beauty's sake. (2) The Arts and Crafts movement (William Morris, Walter Crane) turned the painters' design sense into wallpaper, textiles, furniture. (3) European Symbolism (Klimt explicitly studied Burne-Jones) picked up the long-necked women and dreamlike compositions. Three twentieth-century movements grew directly out of seven young men in a Bloomsbury studio in 1848.

How to hang Pre-Raphaelite paintings in a modern interior

The colour saturation is the entire point. Paint the walls accordingly. Millais's Ophelia hangs best against deep sage, olive, or moss green; the painting was made to read against Victorian dark wallpapers and modern matte deep colours work the same way. Frame in oxidised brass or dark walnut; the prints suffer in gilt frames (the Victorian original frames are gilt, but the prints want quieter weight). Hang as single anchors. Never group two Pre-Raphaelites; the saturation competes. Size: 24x36 or 30x45 for landscape paintings, 18x24 for portraits.

Key takeaways

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood formed in 1848 in London. Seven young painters rejecting the dominant academic convention.
Formal rules: outdoor painting with botanical precision, saturated colour on white ground, literary subject with ordinary face.
Millais painted Ophelia outdoors for five months and indoors for four; every flower is symbolically chosen.
Rossetti painted the same women repeatedly: Lizzie Siddal, Jane Morris, Fanny Cornforth.
Burne-Jones extended the movement into the 1880s and connected it to Arts and Crafts and European Symbolism (Klimt).