The Pre-Raphaelites and the National Gallery

Abstract

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood grew out of friendships and shared views on art formed by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti when they were students together at the Royal Academy Schools. This was in the 1840s, at which time the Academy's premises were part of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. The building was then much smaller than it is today and both institutions, the Academy and the Gallery, complained bitterly of lack of space; the collection of some two hundred paintings hung in the west wing, and the Academy occupied the east. In the Schools it was part of every student's training to study the art of the past as represented on the walls of the National Gallery, and the painting student would make copies there as a matter of course. There were other public collections within fairly easy reach, notably the Dulwich Picture Gallery, and celebrated works from all over Europe were to hand in the form of engravings. Yet the pictures the Academy student lived with, getting to know them by seeing them regularly in the flesh, as often casually as by design, were those in the National Gallery. The collection played a key part in forming the taste of the young Pre-Raphaelites, and I will show echoes of particular works from the National Gallery in pictures painted by all three leading members of the group during the first heady years following the foundation of the PRB in 1848. Like all students in the Schools, the Pre-Raphaelites had a thorough grounding in the artistic theory of Sir Joshua Reynolds. In his canonical Discourses, Reynolds urged the young artist to look hard at the art of