The Pre-Raphaelites at Tate Britain

A secret brotherhood of seven members

In September 1848, seven young London artists — among them Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, all barely twenty at the time — found the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a secret movement whose very name is a manifesto: they reject academic painting as taught since Raphael, which they consider artificial and mannered, in favour of returning to the minute precision and vivid colour of art before the Italian Renaissance.

This room covers sixty years of that aesthetic, from the initial revolt of 1848 to its later extensions toward 1905 — the time it took the movement to move from scandal to lasting influence over an entire generation of British painters.

1. An Annunciation with no halo and no triumphant lily

Ecce Ancilla Domini! ("Behold the handmaid of the Lord"), painted by Rossetti in 1849-1850, deliberately breaks with centuries of pictorial convention: Mary is not standing serenely before the angel, she is seated on her bed, drawn back, visibly frightened by Gabriel's appearance. Her long white nightgown suggests a young bride rather than a sacred figure, and the whole composition — walls, linen, clothing — is painted in an almost monochrome range of whites, to stress the purity of the moment rather than its glory.

The painting scandalises on its showing in 1850: the press finds it too raw, almost profane in its treatment of a central religious subject. This is a typical reaction to how the Brotherhood was received at the time — judged both too archaic in its references and too realistic in its treatment of bodies.

2. Beata Beatrix: painting the grief of his own wife

Elizabeth Siddal, model and then wife of Rossetti, dies in 1862 of a laudanum overdose, in circumstances her circle suspects to have been suicide. Rossetti paints Beata Beatrix in the years that follow, drawing on the many drawings he had made of her while she was alive: the painting officially represents Beatrice, Dante's beloved in the Vita Nuova, at the moment of her own death — but everyone at the time understood it also as a posthumous portrait of Siddal herself.

Look for the symbols scattered through the composition: a red dove, messenger of love, drops a white poppy into Beatrice's hands — the flower from which laudanum is extracted, the very substance that killed Siddal. The painting works simultaneously as literary illustration and personal elegy, the two readings overlapping without ever fully separating.

3. Millais and Holman Hunt: the scandal of realism

Christ in the House of His Parents (1849-1850) by Millais triggered one of the biggest scandals of Victorian painting: the scene shows Joseph's carpentry workshop with a crude realism — wood shavings, dirty fingernails, a bleeding wound on the child Christ's hand — judged unworthy of a sacred subject. Charles Dickens himself wrote a scathing review, describing the young Christ as "a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy" and Mary as so ugly she would "stand out from the rest of the company as a monster in the vilest cabaret in France."

The Awakening Conscience (1853) by Holman Hunt shows a kept woman suddenly rising from her lover's lap, as if struck by a moral revelation — her gaze fixed on a window outside the frame that only the mirror behind the couple lets us glimpse, a reflection of a sunlit garden symbolising possible redemption. Under the table, a cat toys with a bird with a broken wing, a barely veiled image of the woman's own plight; her clasped hands wear a ring on every finger except the left ring finger, the one discreet clue that she is not married.

4. Rossetti, between mythology and thwarted love

Proserpine (1874) shows Jane Morris, Rossetti's muse and mistress, in the role of the goddess held captive in the underworld for eating six pomegranate seeds — the fruit she holds here, half-eaten, a symbol of her confinement. Rossetti worked on this subject for seven years, across eight different versions; the choice of theme is not neutral, since Jane herself was torn between her husband William Morris and her affair with the painter.

The Beloved ('The Bride') (1865-1866) illustrates a verse from the Song of Songs and gathers the bride surrounded by four bridesmaids with contrasting complexions, a composition inspired by Manet's Olympia, which Rossetti had seen in the French painter's studio during a trip to Paris in 1864. The painting, one of Rossetti's most richly coloured, celebrates the diversity of complexions as much as the precise instant the bride draws back her veil.

5. Ford Madox Brown and Burne-Jones, two fellow travellers

Chaucer at the Court of Edward III, painted by Ford Madox Brown between 1856 and 1868, shows the poet Geoffrey Chaucer reading his "Legend of Custance" (from The Canterbury Tales) to the court of Edward III — a reduced, highly detailed replica of Brown's much larger 1847-51 original, now held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Brown used friends and fellow artists as models rather than professionals, notably asking Dante Gabriel Rossetti to sit for the figure of Chaucer himself, with other Pre-Raphaelite circle members appearing among the courtiers. Though never a formal member of the Brotherhood, Brown was one of its closest and most influential fellow travellers.

Frieze of Eight Women Gathering Apples, painted by Edward Burne-Jones in 1876, shows eight women in individualised poses, dress and hairstyles, arranged along a wall, apparently gathering apples — a subject linked to the myth of the Garden of the Hesperides, a theme Burne-Jones treated in several other works. Burne-Jones, a second-generation Pre-Raphaelite, worked closely with Rossetti and William Morris throughout his career.

How much time

Spend time in front of the four Rossettis and the two Millais and Holman Hunt scandals before moving through the rest of the room, which gathers other figures of the movement and its legacy into the turn of the twentieth century.

Ecce Ancilla Domini! — 8 minutes.
Beata Beatrix — 8 minutes.
Christ in the House of His Parents — 8 minutes.
The Awakening Conscience — 8 minutes.
Proserpine — 7 minutes.
The Beloved ('The Bride') — 6 minutes.
Chaucer at the Court of Edward III (Brown) — 8 minutes.
Frieze of Eight Women Gathering Apples (Burne-Jones) — 7 minutes.

Sources and verification

Checked against Tate's collection pages (tate.org.uk) and cross-checked with Wikipedia EN/FR.

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Tate Britain, London

“He has been here and fired a gun” The 1832 incident that defined English painting’s most famous rivalry. Tudor England’s portraitists were refugees The oldest painting at Tate, and four centuries of migrant artists.

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The Pre-Raphaelites: painting the Middle Ages to attack their own century