As Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, and Tennyson did in letters, the Pre-Raphaelites defined the Victorian age with paintbrush and canvas. Scandalous in their time, their moral seriousness about art was itself deeply Victorian, however much the public thought otherwise. They were every bit as didactic as any preacher. Intensely English, mixing Christian religious allegory with fairy tales, literary and mythic themes - Arthurian legend provided a deep wellspring of imagery - with a simmering sensuality, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood sought to reinvigorate the pictorial arts.
Rejecting sterile academic convention, which, they charged, stressed mannered artifice at the expense of “truth,’’ they took their example from the 14th and early 15th century Italian painters who came before Raphael. (Like many avant-gardes, the way forward was to look backward.) Fidelity to nature was one of their creeds: In his famed painting of Ophelia’s drowning, John Everett Millais was said to have scoured the English countryside for just the right brook - only to complain when swans ate the plants as he painted them.
