Art Chowder September | October, Issue 17 | Page 38

T
he Brotherhood was formed the
same year as the revolutions of 1848
on the European continent, but the
motivation of this small group of artists
was not political. They were “radicals”
strictly in the sense of seeking to
return to roots that they believed had
been abandoned. The closest thing to
a “manifesto” may be what Rossetti’s
brother William Michael Rossetti (one of
the seven founding members) set down
in 1895.
Sir John Everett Millais (1829–1896)
“1, To have genuine ideas to express;
2, to study Nature attentively, so as
to know how to express them; 3, to
sympathise with what is direct and
serious and heartfelt in previous art, to
the exclusion of what is conventional and
self-parading and learned by rote; and 4,
and most indispensable of all, to produce
thoroughly good pictures and statues. 3 ”
They essentially rejected the grand
manner of classicism developed by
the followers of Raphael, which had
dominated what they considered rule-
bound academicism for centuries. Instead
of looking to the antique for authority,
they turned to Nature. In his 1905
memoir of the P.R.B., Hunt made plain
that it was not “Pre-Raphaelism” — it
was rather the codification of rules of art
by the Raphaelites, “His followers (who)
accentuated his poses into postures.
They caricatured the turns of his heads
and the lines of his limbs, so that figures
were drawn in patterns; they twisted
companies of men into pyramids, and
placed them like pieces on the chess-
bo