“The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood” were a group of mid-Victorican British painters, poets, artisans and writers. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais were some of the first members, but a number of artists eventually became associated with their particular aesthetic ideas including Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Christina Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, and many others.

Both in the work and in their personal lives, the Pre-Raphalites scorned and flouted convention. They rejected the aesthetic conventions of Victorian painting, looking back to medieval culture for inspiration (hence, their name: a rejection of the mannered aping of renaissance art they felt characterized Victorian convention). But, their rebellion went further: they also wished to create a new kind of society. They rejected the ugliness, conformity and mass production of post-industrial revolution Europe (William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement fits in here) and the debased living conditions industrial capitalism had created for most of humanity (again Morris, but also the strong socialist streak in many of the pre-raphaelites).

But what really got up the nose of the Victorian public was the pre-raphaelite’s attitude towards women. They held them to be equals (although in a perhaps more limited sense than a contemporary feminist would) allowing them the sexual freedoms of men, training and ecouraging them as artists in their own right, and treating their models with fairness and dignity. The women they used as models often lived with their families, employed as nannies or grinding paints or some sort of dignified employment rather than being tossed back into the street.

The relationships between husbands and wives were at times pretty fluid, but always out in the open with the full knowledge of all involved. Victorian society saw them as shocking and immoral libertines, they saw themselves as living lives more honest and caring than the typical male double-standard of wife at home/brothel visits at night.

And they championed a completely new standard of feminine beauty. They replaced the delicate featured, rose-bud mouthed, tiny, blonde ideal Victorian woman with images of tall, large bodied, strong browed and RED HAIRED women! Google Jane Morris and you’ll get the picture. Dark women! Women with womanly shapes! Undemure women! (Even the Burne-Jones figures pictured here display the standard straight brow and largish nose and full lips of the pre-raphaelite feminine ideal)

And they had the effrontery to actually paint religious subjects! Sometimes using these “manly” women! Sometimes using androgynous male/female blends! Sometimes they used realistic and not idealized looking men and women! Charles Dickens denounced John Everett Millais’ “Christ in the House of His Parents” as making the Holy Family look like drunken slum dwellers.

And sometimes, I hope you’re sitting down, using women as models for…Christ. William Holman Hunt’s famous painting “The Light of the World” was painted using a female model for the face. Although its since become a beloved and conventional representation of the Christ, at the time it’s subtle androgyny caused more than a little discomfort.

Of course, by the time these Burne-Jones figures were reprinted here, all this had receded in public memory. Still, it gave me a mischievous chuckle to find the work of a member of such denounced and controversial group here. It really speaks to a kind of ecumenical aesthetic that seems to have disappeared from contemporary lds publications (at least as far as I know).

Anyhow, thanks for sharing. I look forward to see the rest as they come along.

Steve, Clark, Clair, I’m glad you like this. As you can guess, there are a LOT of posts coming, and I hope you don’t get burned out on them. At last check in every once in a while on segments when you recognize that a story you like is apt to have been illustrated.