Pre-Raphaelite painting and nineteenth-century realism - Marcia Werner

This book reconsiders and revises our understanding of Pre-Raphaelite painting: its philosophy of art, its sources, its cohesiveness, and its relationship to the broader context of contemporary European Realism. Challenging several long-standing beliefs about the movement, which is often characterized as a disparate group who pursued divergent, even antithetical goals, Marcia Werner proposes that the Pre-Raphaelites developed and shared an artistic philosophy comprehensive enough to embrace all of their differences. Werner reconstructs this credo through careful study of writings by Pre-Raphaelite artists. She also examines unexplored and neglected contemporary intellectual and philosophical sources, particularly those of J. S. Mill and Thomas Carlyle, whose work is shown to be critical to an understanding of Pre-Raphaelite painting. Supporting her ideas through sustained analyses of key works, the author also argues that John Ruskin's importance to the Pre-Raphaelites has been misunderstood and overstated.