The Pre-Raphaelites and Symbolism

While Paris was arguing about broken colour, a separate revolution had already happened in London — earlier, stranger, and almost entirely disconnected from it. In 1848, three students at the Royal Academy Schools formed a semi-secret society and began signing their pictures PRB. What they produced looks like nothing else in the nineteenth century, and it is the easiest of all Victorian styles to recognise once you know the three tells.

What “Pre-Raphaelite” was against

The Royal Academy taught a manner it traced back to Raphael: stable pyramidal groups, idealised anatomy, form modelled through brown shadow, softened contours, all over a dark ground and finished to invisibility. Sir Joshua Reynolds had codified it; the Brotherhood called him “Sir Sloshua”.

William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti — plus four minor members — wanted what came before Raphael: the clear colour, unforgiving detail and stiff sincerity of Italian painting before about 1500, which they knew largely from engravings of the Campo Santo frescoes at Pisa.

And they had a critic ready-made. John Ruskin, in Modern Painters, had told young artists to go to nature rejecting nothing and selecting nothing. They took him at his word with a literalism he had probably not intended, and when the press savaged them in 1851 Ruskin defended them in The Times.

The three tells

Jewel colour on a wet white ground. Instead of a dark ground, they laid a layer of zinc or lead white and painted thin translucent colour into it while still wet. Light passes through the pigment, strikes the white and comes back, so the colour has the intensity of stained glass. With the new bright pigments of the 1840s you get hard colour and no tonal murk — shadows coloured, not darkened.

Equal focus everywhere. The single most reliable discriminator. Conventional painting obeys aerial perspective: the distance is greyer, bluer and softer because that is what air does. Pre-Raphaelite pictures refuse. A hedge two hundred yards off is painted as sharply as an eyelash, which is why these canvases feel airless, like a very high-resolution dream.

Botany doing two jobs at once. Millais painted the river bank for Ophelia (1851–2) from life on the Hogsmill at Ewell over five months, then added Elizabeth Siddal, posed in a bath in his London studio, over the winter. The willow, nettle, daisy, pansy, violet, poppy and loosestrife are exact to species — and every one carries a meaning in the Victorian language of flowers: forsaken love, pain, innocence, thought, faithfulness, sleep, death. Pre-Raphaelite detail is almost never merely descriptive.

The subjects narrow it further: Shakespeare, Dante, Keats, Tennyson, Malory; Arthurian legend; the Bible treated with shocking literalism, as in Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents (1849–50), which Dickens attacked for showing the Holy Family as actual carpenters; and modern moral subjects like Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (1853). Note what is missing: Greek and Roman antiquity, the academics’ ground.

Pre-Raphaelite versus Victorian academic

This is the confusion that actually costs marks: both are Victorian exhibition pictures, both often showing a woman in drapery under a literary title.

Alma-Tadema’s sunlit marble is the counter-example to hold: obsessive archaeological detail, but warm, blended, tonally coherent, and Roman.

Telling the three founders apart

Millais is the natural. He could paint anything, which is why Ophelia works; after about 1856 he loosens into a broad, fluent and profitable Victorian manner and ends as President of the Royal Academy in 1896. A late Millais looks nothing like the programme.

Hunt never let go. He was the moraliser and the literalist, travelling to Palestine for authentic settings and loading every object with religious significance — The Light of the World (1851–3), The Scapegoat (1854–6). If the detail is oppressive and every item is a symbol, it is Hunt.

Rossetti was never really a naturalist. His perspective is poor, his observed light non-existent, his subjects medieval and Dantesque. From Bocca Baciata (1859) onward he produces a stream of half-length women — massive column of neck, heavy jaw, copper hair, swollen lips — crowded with flowers and symbolic objects and almost without depth: Lady Lilith (1866–8), Proserpine (1874). This second Rossetti is the hinge of the whole story.

Second generation: Burne-Jones and Morris

Burne-Jones and Morris met at Oxford, fell under Rossetti’s spell, and took the movement elsewhere.

Burne-Jones (1833–98) paints elongated, androgynous, dreaming figures in slow friezelike processions — The Golden Stairs (1880), King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (1884), the Briar Rose series (1885–90). His palette is deliberately drained after the Brotherhood’s hardness: muted blue-green, ochre, gold. Surfaces smooth, mood trance rather than moral urgency, nobody fully awake. Two Italian journeys left him steeped in Botticelli and Mantegna.

Morris (1834–96) essentially stopped painting — La Belle Iseult (1858) is his only real easel picture — and turned the medievalism into design and eventually socialism. Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. was founded in 1861; he produced over fifty wallpapers, among them Trellis (1862), Daisy (1864) and Willow (1874), printed by hand from woodblocks with mineral dyes. The principle is flattened, formalised plant form in repeating pattern, never “sham-real boughs and flowers” — the founding gesture of Arts and Crafts.

The crossing into Symbolism

By about 1860 Rossetti had already given up observed nature for mood, dream and erotic mystery. France got there later and gave it a name: in 1886 the critic Jean Moréas published a Symbolist manifesto about poetry, and the term migrated to painting within a few years.

Symbolism is a sensibility, not a style. It rejects description of the visible world in favour of the expression of an idea, and lives on dream, myth, scripture and the psychology of love, fear, death and sexual awakening. The handling therefore varies enormously, so you identify it by subject and mood, not brushwork. The three to have fixed:

Gustave Moreau (1826–98). Academic training and mythological subjects, but encrusted with jewelled, minutely worked ornament until the surface resembles Byzantine goldwork — Salome Dancing before Herod and The Apparition, both 1876. He later taught Matisse and Rouault.

Odilon Redon (1840–1916). The noirs of the 1870s and 1880s are charcoal drawings and lithographs, entirely black, of floating disembodied eyes, human-faced spiders and severed heads. From about 1890 he switches to pastel and oil in luminous floating colour. Same mind, opposite palette.

Gustav Klimt (1862–1918), Vienna Secession, founded 1897. The tell is two registers colliding: naturalistic faces and hands set into flat fields of gold leaf and swarming geometric ornament. The gold phase runs roughly 1901–09, with The Kiss (1907–8) at its centre; the sources are Ravenna mosaic, Japanese design and Symbolist eros.

Tate’s own definition of Symbolism names Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Watts and Beardsley among the British exemplars, alongside Moreau and Redon in France and Khnopff in Belgium — and when Burne-Jones showed at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1889, the French recognised him as one of their own.

The traps

Pre-Raphaelitism is 1848–1854 as a Brotherhood but 1848–1900 as an influence. A jewel-coloured Arthurian picture might be by J. W. Waterhouse in 1888 or Frank Cadogan Cowper in 1920. Waterhouse softens the focus and uses a far more fluent brush: Pre-Raphaelite in subject, half-academic in handling.

Millais and Rossetti both abandoned the programme, in opposite directions. Do not assume a late work by either looks like an early one.

“Aesthetic” is a third category. Whistler, Albert Moore and the later Burne-Jones shade into Aestheticism — art for art’s sake. A Whistler Nocturne shares Symbolism’s indifference to narrative but has none of its mythic content.

How to spot it in ten seconds

1. Test the focus. Is the distance as sharp as the foreground? If yes, and it is Victorian, you are looking at Pre-Raphaelitism.
2. Test the colour. Enamel-bright and high-keyed, with coloured rather than brown shadows, points to the wet white ground.
3. Read the subject. Arthurian, Dantesque, Shakespearean or biblical-literal: Pre-Raphaelite. Greek or Roman: Victorian academic — Leighton, Alma-Tadema, Poynter.
4. Look for symbolic props. Flowers exact to species, a caged bird, a discarded glove, a mirror.
5. Check whether the figures are idealised. Awkward, individual faces mean the Brotherhood; suave anatomy means the Academy.
6. If the focus has gone soft but the mood is medieval, move to the second generation: Rossetti’s crowded half-length women, or Burne-Jones’s drained palette and dreaming processions.
7. Ask whether anyone is awake. Trance, slow procession, muted blue-green and gold: Burne-Jones, 1870s–90s.
8. If it is a flat repeating plant pattern, stop thinking about painting: Morris and Arts and Crafts.
9. If the world is dream rather than observation, you are in Symbolism — encrusted mythological jewels for Moreau, black floating eyes for Redon, gold leaf plus real flesh for Klimt.
10. Check the date logic. Pre-Raphaelite manner with a fluent, softened touch is probably a late follower, not the Brotherhood.