Pre-Raphaelites: 5 reasons why we love them and TOP-5 of their most luxurious paintings

— First of all, it’s really beautiful. Funny… The Pre-Raphaelites

The Pre-Raphaelites were the first European avant-garde artists who protested against еру wigs and powder of the classical portraiture school; they praised naturalness, romantics, and Shakespearean beauty.


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organized their brotherhood to fight the emasculated picture of Raphael and his followers, in order to return to nature. They themselves suffered from cold and heat during their hours of plein air and tortured their models eagering to grasp the essence (Elizabeth Siddal, who posed for Millais’s Ophelia, was so much frozen in a bath of cold water that in the end this masterpiece cost her her life). And what is the result? Grass and flowers are surely depicted very skilfully. But life is not captured exactly enough. Still, not all women are red-haired in life, and even in the middle of the 19th century, they were busy with something else besides sitting in rose bushes and combing their curls. However, the Pre-Raphaelites

The Pre-Raphaelites were the first European avant-garde artists who protested against еру wigs and powder of the classical portraiture school; they praised naturalness, romantics, and Shakespearean beauty.


Read more

did not dare to express their claims: their canvases were very beautiful, sensual and seductive. Some would say that they were too beautiful and would even hold their admiration for the Pre-Raphaelites

The Pre-Raphaelites were the first European avant-garde artists who protested against еру wigs and powder of the classical portraiture school; they praised naturalness, romantics, and Shakespearean beauty.


Read more

as "shameful pleasures" — so be it, because they eventually would also stand in line for the exhibition.

— It’s modern, new, and fresh. Yes, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood appeared a century and a half ago, art critics tend to consider it the first European avant-garde

Avant-garde is how modern art critics refer the general trend of new artistic directions that arose in world art at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. A very thin line separates it from the concept of “modernism”. Read more

movement and the forerunner of Art Nouveau, but it only gained wide popularity outside Britain at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. And it won a lot in contrast with modern art: of course, the excessive, intense beauty of the Pre-Raphaelites

The Pre-Raphaelites were the first European avant-garde artists who protested against еру wigs and powder of the classical portraiture school; they praised naturalness, romantics, and Shakespearean beauty.


Read more

is more attractive to most art consumers than installations of rubbish and Virgin Mary’s portraits made of elephant shit (the latter is not a joke, but a description of a painting by artist Chris Ofili). See for yourself: Chris Ofili, Virgin Mary (1996) and Annunciation by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1850):

And the witch played by Angelina Jolie here in this frame

It has always been important for artists and art collectors how to frame their works of art. We can paraphrase Shakespeare and say,

“What’s in a frame? That which we call a picture
In an improper frame will look less nice.”

Or, perhaps, the picture’s message will be obscured by too ornate or too plain framing. Here, we present a retrospective journey into the history of framing and its evolution, with illustrations and an expert’s commentary. Read more

is placed in a landscape that is accurate to the last blade of grass, as if painted by the same Millais, as a result of a grueling plein air, of course:

One more example. The dress of the beautiful witch Sidonia von Bork from the painting by Edward Burne-Jones is twice quoted in the Sleepy Hollow movie, where it is also worn by a witch, Mary van Tassel. By the way, the original can now be viewed at the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition in Turin, where the Tate Britain collection has arrived after Moscow, Washington and Tokyo.

— It's spicy and exciting. Based on the biographies of Pre-Raphaelite artists, you can even write sentimental articles in women’s magazines, even shoot Oscar-grade films. Artists go crazy, bury and dig their wives out of their graves, they have bunches of mistresses, and just look at the cycle of lovers and models within the brotherhood… You cannot tear yourself away from all this, as well as from the paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites

The Pre-Raphaelites were the first European avant-garde artists who protested against еру wigs and powder of the classical portraiture school; they praised naturalness, romantics, and Shakespearean beauty.


Read more

.
You can spend many evenings, even long winter ones, studying the adventures of Fanny Cornforth, an illiterate prostitute who became a muse, mistress, and at the same time a housekeeper of Rossetti, who was at first considered the husband of Elizabeth Siddal (yes, the same Siddal who posed for the famous Ophelia of Millais), and after her death he was too inconsolable, so he did not bother to marry Fanny, but painted dozens of canvases from her. Lady Lilith of Rosseti (far right in the title photo) is Fanny Cornforth. The witch Sidonia von Bork by Bern-Jones is Fanny Cornforth. And here she comes again:

— And last but not least — the sexuality of the red-haired subjects from the paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites

The Pre-Raphaelites were the first European avant-garde artists who protested against еру wigs and powder of the classical portraiture school; they praised naturalness, romantics, and Shakespearean beauty.


Read more

. Russians often used to irony about the research of British scientists, but the Pre-Raphaelites

The Pre-Raphaelites were the first European avant-garde artists who protested against еру wigs and powder of the classical portraiture school; they praised naturalness, romantics, and Shakespearean beauty.


Read more

are the same British property as these scientists themselves, so this time it would be appropriate to cite their research. So, British scientists have found that women with red hair are more likely than brunettes, brown-haired women and blondes to indulge in love pleasures (and, perhaps, they never say "I have a headache"). That is why men can be found at the Pre-Raphaelites' exhibitions much more often and in much larger numbers than at any other: the reason for such a pilgrimage is clear and requires no explanation from British scientists.


The title photo shows the subjects of Rossetti (the farthest) and Waterhouse’s Mermaid

By the way, a photo version of Leighton’s Flaming June was recently on the cover of VOGUE, and actress Jessica Chastain took a languid pose in front of the camera of the famous Ann Leibovitz.