Why the Pre-Raphaelites rebelled against art norms

HostMost of us think of art rebels as people who make things messy or hard to understand. But in the middle of the eighteen hundreds, a few young guys in London did the opposite. They wanted art to be so sharp and bright that it almost hurt to look at, and it made the people in charge absolutely furious. Why did they feel like they had to start a secret club just to change the way they painted?

GuestIt all came down to how bored they were. These were students at the biggest art school in England, the Royal Academy. And back then, the school was like a factory for one specific kind of look. They had these very strict rules. You had to have a dark corner here, a bright light there, and everyone’s skin had to look like smooth, glowing wax. One of the leaders of the school was a man named Sir Joshua Reynolds. The students actually nicknamed him Sir Sloshua because they thought his style was just a bunch of brown, muddy slop. They wanted something that felt alive, not something that looked like it had been sitting in a dusty basement for a hundred years. So they formed this secret group called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

HostBut Raphael is one of the greats. He's basically the gold standard for most people. It feels a bit bold for a bunch of teenagers to say he ruined everything.

GuestWell, they didn't necessarily hate the man himself. They hated what he represented. To them, Raphael was the moment art stopped being honest and started being about showing off. After him, every painter tried to make people look more perfect than they really were. The muscles were too big, the poses were too grand, and every face looked the same. These students wanted to go back to the time before that. They loved the artists from the middle ages because those painters actually looked at the world. If someone had a crooked nose or a messy house, that's what went on the wood. The Brotherhood wanted to bring that honesty back to London, which was becoming a very gray, smoky, industrial place.

HostSo they were trying to be more real. But when I look at their paintings, they look almost like a dream. The colors are so loud. How's that more honest than what the school was teaching?

GuestIt's because of how they actually put the paint on. At the academy, you were taught to paint on a dark background. You would start with a brownish layer and then add light colors on top. It made everything look very dramatic, but also very dim. These rebels did the opposite. They took a white canvas and put down a layer of wet white paint first. Then they painted their colors right on top of that while it was still wet. It's like the difference between looking at a screen with the brightness turned all the way down versus looking at a stained glass window with the sun hitting it. Every leaf, every blade of grass, and every drop of water was painted with that same level of care. They would spend weeks outdoors in the cold just to get one small bush right.

HostThat sounds like a lot of work for a background. I mean, does a viewer really need to see every single vein in a leaf to get the point of the story?

GuestThey thought so. They called it being true to nature. They believed that if you cheated on the small things, like the way a shadow falls on a rock, then you were lying about the big things, too. There's a famous painting of a woman named Ophelia floating in a river. The artist, John Everett Millais, spent months sitting by a real stream in the country. He painted the weeds and the flowers so well that a professor of plants could actually use the painting for a lesson. He even made his model sit in a bathtub for hours so he could see how her hair really moved in the water. The poor girl got a terrible cold because the lamps underneath the tub went out, but he wouldn't stop. He needed it to be real.

HostIt sounds like they were obsessed with the tiny details, but did the public actually care? If I saw a painting that looked that sharp today, I would probably just think it was a photo.

GuestPeople back then hated it at first. It was a huge scandal. Even Charles Dickens, the writer, got into the fight. He saw one of their paintings of a young Jesus in a carpenter shop. Usually, Jesus was painted looking very clean and holy. But this group painted him as a real kid in a real, dirty workshop with wood shavings on the floor and a mother who looked like she had been working hard all day. Dickens said it looked like a scene from a bad neighborhood. He thought it was ugly and disrespectful. But that was exactly what the Brotherhood wanted. They wanted to show that the most important stories in the world didn't happen in some golden, perfect dreamland. They happened in the dirt and the sun among real people.

HostSo they were really fighting against the idea that art had to be pretty or polite to be good.

GuestExactly. They were tired of the polite lies. They wanted to strip away all the rules about what was beautiful. They even started painting about things that were happening in London right then, like poor women trying to make a living or people moving away to find work. They used those same bright colors and sharp lines to make you look at things you might usually want to ignore. Even though the group only stayed together for a few years, they changed how people thought about what a painting could do. They proved that you could be a rebel just by looking very, very closely at the world around you.

HostThe biggest thing they left behind wasn't a set of rules, but the idea that a painter should actually look at a flower before they try to draw it.

HostThat bright, clear light they fought for reminds me that even a simple weed in the backyard is worth a second look if you really bother to see it.