Authors: Christopher Wood.
Paperback, 160 pages
Publisher: Seven Dials
Publication Date: 2001-06-30


Reviews :

    Chart the rise and legacy of the Pre-Raphaelites and see how this most admired British art movement was born. Dozens of reproductions attest to these painters’ scrupulous attention to natural details: more than 40 artists are represented, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Arthur Hughes, Edward Burne-Jones, John William Waterhouse, and Ford Maddox Brown.
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Authors:
Paperback, 571 pages
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Publication Date: 1975-09-15
Edition: 2

Reviews :

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Authors: Tim Barringer.
Paperback, 176 pages
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publication Date: 1999-02-08


Reviews :

    This lavishly illustrated book provides a fresh appraisal of the Pre-Raphaelite artists of mid-Victorian England and their radical departure from artistic conventions. Tim Barringer explores the meanings encoded in Pre-Raphaelite paintings and finds a dynamic energy that arises from paradoxes at the heart of the movement, between past and present, historicism and modernity, and symbolism and realism....

Authors: Pamela Todd.
Hardcover, 192 pages
Publisher: Watson-Guptill Publications
Publication Date: 2001-10


Reviews :

    Set against the background of an opulent and affluent Victorian art establishment, Pre-Raphaelites at Home tells the story of a fiery group of artists whose ideas—which were seen as revolutionary—and avant-garde lifestyle-deemed impossibly bohemian—were at odds with the conventional wisdom of the time.

Led by the charismatic Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the semi-secret Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood attracted some of the most colorful and complex personalities of the age, including William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Ford Madox Brown, and Edward Burne-Jones. These artists took their creative inspiration not from the works of other painters, but directly from nature. Female beauty was central to their art; friendship, to their lives.

The lively, entertaining narrative is lavishly illustrated throughout with beautiful color reproductions of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, as well as wonderful photographs of the artists and their homes and studios....

Authors: Elizabeth Prettejohn.
Hardcover, 304 pages
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication Date: 2000-11-15


Reviews :

    Though always controversial in art circles, the Pre-Raphaelites have also always been extremely popular with museum goers. This accessible new study provides the most comprehensive view of the movement to date. It shows us why, a century and a half later, Pre-Raphaelite art retains its power to fascinate, haunt, and often shock its viewers.

Calling themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt produced a statement of ideas that revolutionized art practice in Victorian England. Critical of the Royal Academy's formulaic works, these painters believed that painting had been misdirected since Raphael. They and the artists who joined with them, including William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, and Frederick George Stephens, created bright works representing nature and literary themes in fresh detail and color. Considered heretical by many and frequently admonished for a lack of grace in composition the group disbanded after only a few years. Yet its artists and ideals remained influential; its works, greatly admired.

In this richly illustrated book, Elizabeth Prettejohn raises new and provocative questions about the group's social and artistic identity. Was it the first avant-garde movement in modern art? What role did women play in the Pre-Raphaelite fraternity? How did relationships between the artists and models affect the paintings? The author also analyzes technique, pinning down the distinctive characteristics of these painters and evaluating the degree to which a group style existed. And she considers how Pre-Raphaelite art responded to and commented on its time and place a world characterized by religious and political controversy, new scientific concern for precise observation, the emergence of psychology, and changing attitudes toward sexuality and women.

The first major publication on the Pre-Raphaelite movement in more than fifteen years, this exquisite volume incorporates the swell of recent research into a comprehensive, up-to-date survey. It comprises well over two hundred color reproductions, including works that are immediately recognizable as Pre-Raphaelite masterpieces, as well as lesser-known paintings that expand our appreciation of this significant artistic departure....

Authors: Gay Daly.
Paperback, 468 pages
Publisher: Quality Paperback Book Club
Publication Date: 2002-03-01


Reviews :

    In 1848 a group of brilliant young artists banded together and dubbed themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Believing that painting had declined since the time of Raphael, they decreed that every rose must be painted from a live flower and every face from a human being. Inevitably, their creative passions became tangled with romantic ones, as the artists--William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and later, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris--became involved with their models in tempestuous, sometimes tragic, relationships.

Anyone who has seen the work of the Pre-Raphaelites has been struck by the dreamy, luminous women portrayed in the paintings. But who were these women? And what happened when these beautiful girls who consented to model--scandalous behavior at the time--found themselves idealized and adored by the men who painted them? In this ambitious and immensely readable book, author Gay Daly introduces us to these intriguing women:

Elizabeth Siddal, the shopgirl so memorably painted as Ophelia and Beatrice, who finally married Rossetti after ten years of nerve-wracking courtship, and died at 32, a suicide.

Annie Miller, the barmaid taken up as a "project" by the besotted Hunt, who turned the tables on her suitor when he failed to go through with their marriage.

Effie Gray, who ultimately experienced happiness and sexual pleasure with Millais--but only after a six-year marriage to the art critic John Ruskin that was never consummated.

Fannie and Edith Waugh, sisters who both married Hunt, Edith becoming his wife after the death of her older sister, a union that was illegal in England at the time.

Georgiana MacDonald, who never stopped loving her husband, Burne-Jones, even though he pursued romantic adventures outside the marriage for thirty years.

Jane Burden, wife to Morris, who met her match in Rossetti, becoming his muse just as Lizzie Siddal had been before her death.

Pre-Raphaelites in Love draws on a wealth of original letters and diaries to reveal the complicated, stormy, and extraordinarily binding relationships of these artists and the women they loved. The result is a vivid, personal group portrait, a provocative exploration of marriage and the challenges inherent in intimacy, as well as a glimpse of the fragile kinship between romance and inspiration....

Authors: Laurence Des Cars.
Paperback, 127 pages
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
Publication Date: 2000-05-01


Reviews :

    This study of Pre-Raphaelite painters and poets reveals a style-derived from the idealized view of nature in the early Italian Renaissance-steeped in mythology and literary allusion and very popular today with lovers of romantic art and poetry. 125 illustrations, 95 in full color, 5 x 7"...

Authors: Susan Herbert.
Hardcover, 64 pages
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Publication Date: 1999-09


Reviews :

    Susan Herbert's feline versions of famous paintings have found an appreciative audience among both cat and art lovers. It was inevitable that she should be attracted to the works of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, whose heyday was in the latter half of the nineteenth century, but whose popularity has reached new heights today. Well-known works by such artists as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Holman Hunt can be viewed in a new and entrancing way when their protagonists are endearing cats. The Beggar Maid, "more beautiful than day" in Tennyson's poem, takes on a particularly touching relationship with King Cophetua, while Medea gives new meaning to the word enchantress as she prepares the ingredients for a spell. And were ever two creatures so frightened and so abandoned as the poor cat princes wickedly imprisoned in the tower, or two lovers so sad and so stoical as the young officer cat and his fiance on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo? A special feature of this book is its inclusion of black-and-white reproductions of all the original paintings that have inspired Herbert. They afford interesting and surprising comparisons, concluding a book of irresistible delights on every page....

Authors: Jan Marsh. Pamela Gerrish Nunn.
Paperback, 160 pages
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Publication Date: 1999-04-01


Reviews :

    The work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their followers is enduringly popular and correspondingly familiar to a wide public. Works by women artists within the Pre-Raphaelite style have, however, largely been forgotten and ignored in the history of the movement. This book, published to accompany an exhibition in Manchester, England, brings together paintings, drawings, photographs, and other works that women contributed to the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Many are reproduced and documented here for the first time. Spanning three generations from the 1840s to the early 1900s, the artists include Barbara Bodichon, Anna Howitt, Rosa Brett, Anna Blunden, Jane Benham Hay, Joanna Boyce, Elizabeth Siddal, Rebecca Solomon, Emma Sandys, Julia Margaret Cameron, Lucy and Catherine Madox Brown, Marie Spartali Stillman, Maria Zambaco, Francesca Alexander, Evelyn De Morgan, Kate Bunce, Marianne Stokes, Christina Herringham, and Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale. Their works demonstrate that Pre-Raphaelitism is a broader historical movement than has previously been recognized and that women were active in all its phases. Their re-inclusion in Pre-Raphaelite history will redefine its scope, concerns, and achievements, as well as restore a wealth of neglected works to public attention....

Authors: Debra N. Mancoff.
Paperback, 128 pages
Publisher: Pomegranate
Publication Date: 2000-08