Pre-Raphaelite Paintings & Artworks

Featured Pre-Raphaelite Fine Artists

John William Waterhouse was born in 1849 in Rome, Italy, although his family moved to England when he was five. He died in 1917. He studied painting under his father and the Royal Academy art school, and his works were exhibited at the Royal Academy's exhibitions from 1874 until his death in 1917. While his art and that of the other Pre-Raphaelites was out of vogue by his death, he is considered today to be perhaps the most accomplished of the Pre-Raphaelite painters. His paintings feature classical, medieval, or legendary themes. [More...]

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the son of Italian immigrants, was born in 1828 in London, England, and died in 1882. He studied art under Ford Maddox Brown and at the Royal Academy schools. His wife, Edith Siddal, was featured in many of Rossetti's paintings and modeled for many of the other Pre-Raphaelite painters, most notably for John Everett Millais' painting of Ophelia for which she had to lay immersed in a tub of water (and which was later blamed, probably inaccurately, for her following poor health and death after a still birth). Rossetti's work later influenced the painters of the Symbolist movement. [More...]

John Everett Millais was born in 1829 in South Hampton, England, and died in 1896. He studied art at the Royal Academy schools, which is where he met Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt, together with whom he was later to found the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. He was blamed, most likely unfairly, for the poor health and death of Edith Siddal, wife of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, after she posed in a tub of water for his painting of Ophelia. The critic, Ruskin, early championed his work, but later called it a "catastrophe," after his wife (who was still a virgin) gained an annulment and married Millais. [More...]