“REBELS AND DISTURBERS”: THE PRE-RAPHAELITE MOVEMENT AS THE UNDERGROUND OF VICTORIANITY

Abstract

The article clarifies the historical and cultural context of the origin, formation and outspread of the Pre- Rephaelite movement as underground art in Victorian England of the 19th century. A gradation of the degree of membership in the brotherhood is established: “senior” and “junior” Pre-Raphaelites, artists of the Pre-Raphaelite circle and their followers. The attention of the research is focused on the “senior brothers” founders and ideologues of the fellowship. The first works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), William Holman Hunt (1827–1910) and John Everett Millais (1829–1896) are considered. The theoretical guidelines of the latest Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics are clarified and its origins are traced in the works of John Ruskin (1819–1900) and the works of the “Nazarenes”: Johann Friedrich Overbeck (1789–1869) and Franz Pforr (1788–1812). Based on the analysis of the canvases of the first exhibition of the mentioned authors, the specifics of the author’s image are summarized, in particular, the technique of painting on a raw white ground, which gave the paintings the effect of “light from the inside”, the instruction to reproduce nature down to the smallest details, which was expressed in the predominant work on plein air, the reading of biblical themes in a realistic approach of Victorian reality. The confrontation between the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood and the orthodox school of English academic art and the wider Victorian society in terms of the morality/immorality of the proposed latest ideas is indicated. The role of Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812–1870) and his crushing article in creating a stalemate for the brotherhood is outlined, which forced artists to new artistic searches and the evolution of ideas, which eventually became the basis for changing the artistic paradigm of all world art at the end of the 19th century.