The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: Their Art and Market

The group's goals were summarised in four points by the writer William Michael Rossetti, a founding member and brother to the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti:
1. Have genuine ideas to express
2. Study nature attentively, in order to know how to express them
3. Align themselves with what they considered direct and serious in art as opposed to what is conventional and taught
4. Produce 'good' paintings and sculpture

 

Despite these seemingly un-objectable goals, the group was considered radical by the Victorian society in which it was founded and rejected both on the basis of its manner and of its content. The uncompromising realism and extreme detail of their compositions shocked viewers and critics alike, with the author Charles Dickinson describing the figure of the Virgin in John Everett Millais' Christ in the house of his parents, exhibited in 1850, as 'horrible in her ugliness' and comparing the Holy Family to slum-dwellers. Rather than painting idealised types, the Pre-Raphaelites based the religious figures on contemporary - and often well-known - models. in this instanced, Millais had used his sister-in-law, Mary Hodgkinson, as his model for the Virgin. Moreover, the painters' densely detailed works challenged their viewers, while their jewel-like colours stood out shockingly, or even garishly, against the subtler colouring of more traditional works.

 

Later in the 19th Century, however, the movement enjoyed somewhat of a recovery in its reputation - largely thanks to its association with John Ruskin and a move towards a second phase that was more Romantic and mythical in theme. This new trend was exemplified in the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who painted elegant and appealing women from literature and mythology in elaborately detailed interior and garden settings. Without the controversy of Christian iconography, viewers were free to appreciate the visual qualities of the work. Rossetti's manner also inspired his friend William Morris, the influential textile designer and founder of the Arts & Crafts movement, and by extension other popular contemporary interior designers and architects. With its new, mainstream identity, the Pre-Raphaelite movement continued to exert an impact on successive generations of British artists into the 20th Century.

 

The Brotherhood's fortunes changed once again after the First World War. Avant garde movements like Cubism and Abstract Expressionism were gaining momentum and critical attention - controversial though it may have been - and Pre-Raphaelite art was considered overly fussy, backward-thinking and sentimental. Market prices stagnated in the early decades of the 20th Century, and after the 1901 Whitechapel exhibitions Modern Pictures by living artists, Pre-Raphaelites and old masters, which featured Pre-Raphaelite paintings alongside old masters, there was little institutional interest until the Tate's 1948 exhibition held to mark the centenary of the Brotherhood's foundation. Interest picked up more readily from 1969, when the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool held a landmark exhibition on the work of William Holman Hunt, kicking off a series of monographic exhibitions on the various Pre-Raphaelite artists. Also critical to rising popularity was the 1984 Tate exhibition The Pre-Raphaelites, which set the course of scholarship for the following three decades. It led to a market revival that began in the 1980s and lasted through the 90s, with public interest further bolstered by the 2013-14 Tate retrospective Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-garde.

 

The popularity of the Tate show undoubtedly influenced the spectacular price achieved in July 2013 at Christie's for Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones's watercolour Love among the ruins, which fetched £14.8 million (including premium) against an already healthy estimate of £3-5 million. Other top auction prices were achieved in 2010 for Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's The Finding of Moses (1904) which sold for $35.9 million at Sotheby's, and for the same artist's Antony and Cleopatra (1883), which achieved $29.2 million at Sotheby's in 2011. Among the most notable private collectors of Pre-Raphaelite art are Sir Andrew Lloyd-Webber, whose collection was the subject of the 2003 Royal Academy exhibition Pre-Raphaelite and other masters: The Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection, and Isabel Goldsmith, whose collection, much of it focused on the work of Burne-Jones, was dispersed at Christie's in 2022.

 

Although many British museums can boast exceptional collections of Pre-Raphaelite art, it is less commonly found in international collections. In the United States, one of the finest group of Pre-Raphaelite art belongs to the Delaware Art Museum thanks to the generosity of Samuel Bancroft, a Wilmington textile mill owner. Bancroft saw Rossetti's Vision of Fiametta (1878) in 1800 and, galvanised, he acquired an impressive collection which he bequeathed to the museum in 1935. More recently, the Art Institute of Chicago acquired one of four versions of William Holman Hunt's The Shadow of Death (1873-74) from the Lloyd-Webber collection in 2021, a work that has been described as the most important Pre-Raphaelite painting in America.