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Andave_ya mentioned that she liked the Midsummer's Eve painting from my "Nice Art" blog post. The artist is Edward Roberts Hughes, who painted in the Pre-Raphealite style. You can learn more about him here.


Edward Robert Hughes
Heart of Snow


Twilight Fantasies



The Pre-Raphealite movement may be of interest to many book lovers. One of the defining qualities of this school of art is by and large drawing subject matter and inspiration from literary works including Greek Mythology and Arthurian Legend.

Artists by Movement:

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
Britain, 1848 to Late 19th Century


The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was created in 1848 by seven artists: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, John Everett Millais, Frederic George Stephens, Thomas Woolner and William Holman Hunt. Their goal was to develop a naturalistic style of art, throwing away the rules and conventions that were drilled into students' heads at the Academies. Raphael was the artist they considered to have achieved the highest degree of perfection, so much so that students were encouraged to draw from his examples rather than from nature itself; thus they became the "Pre-Raphaelites".

The group popularized a theatrically romantic style, marked by great beauty, an intricate realism, and a fondness for Arthurian and Greek legend.

The movement itself did not last past the 1850s, but the style remained popular for decades, influencing the Arts and Crafts Movement, the Symbolist painters, and even the Classicists.

The term Pre-Raphaelite, which refers to both art and literature, is confusing because there were essentially two different and almost opposed movements, the second of which grew out of the first. The term itself originated in relation to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an influential group of mid-nineteenth-century avante garde painters associated with Ruskin who had great effect upon British, American, and European art. Those poets who had some connection with these artists and whose work presumably shares the characteristics of their art include Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, George Meredith, William Morris, and Algernon Charles Swinburne.

Rossetti Millais The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) was founded in 1849 by William Holman Hunt (1827-1910), D.G. Rossetti, John Everett Millais (1829-1896), William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Thomas Woolner, and F. G. Stephens to revitalize the arts. (Even though William and Michael sister, Christina, never was an official member of the Brotherhood, she was a crucial member of the inner circle. Although the young would-be art revolutionaries never published a manifesto, their works and memoirs show that having read Ruskin's praise of the artist as prophet, they hoped to create an art suitable for the modern age by:

1. Testing and defying all conventions of art; for example, if the Royal Academy schools taught art students to compose paintings with (a) pyramidal groupings of figures, (b) one major source of light at one side matched by a lesser one on the opposite, and (c) an emphasis on rich shadow and tone at the expense of color, the PRB with brilliant perversity painted bright-colored, evenly lit pictures that appeared almost flat.

2. The PRB also emphasized precise, almost photographic representation of even humble objects, particularly those in the immediate foreground (which were traditionally left blurred or in shade) --thus violating conventional views of both proper style and subject.

3. Following Ruskin, they attempted to transform the resultant hard-edge realism (created by 1 and 2) by combining it with typological symbolism. At their most successful, the PRB produced a magic or symbolic realism, often using devices found in the poetry of Tennyson and Browning.

4. Believing that the arts were closely allied, the PRB encouraged artists and writers to practice each other's art, though only D.G. Rossetti did so with particular success.

5. Looking for new subjects, they drew upon Shakespeare, Keats, and Tennyson.

Of course, I can't resist throwing in a few more paintings...

J. W. Waterhouse:
Destiny


The Soul of the Rose (black and white study)