Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is a 19th-century english group of painters who rejected academic training and looked back to art before raphael for inspiration.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in London in September 1848 by three young Royal Academy students — Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais — who rejected what they saw as the formulaic conventions of academic art and sought to revive the bright colour, sincere observation, and moral seriousness of European painting before Raphael. Their work was characterised by jewel-like colour applied on a wet white ground, an intense fidelity to natural detail, and subjects drawn from medieval romance, the Bible, Shakespeare, and Tennyson. Millais's 'Ophelia' (1851–1852) and Hunt's 'The Light of the World' (1851–1853) became Victorian icons. The original Brotherhood lasted only a few years, but its influence extended through a second generation including Edward Burne-Jones and the polymath William Morris, who carried Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics into the Arts and Crafts movement. John Ruskin, the most influential English art critic of the century, championed the group from the start, giving them critical legitimacy in the face of fierce early hostility.