A tremendously engaging account of the turbulent relationships between the Pre-Raphaelite painters and the models who seemed to embody their dreams. Two photo inserts.

This publication marks the centenary of Simeon Solomon (1840-1905), a leading painter of the Pre-Raphaelite group that formed around Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the mid-nineteenth century. A precocious young talent, Solomon enjoyed early critical success with his paintings of biblical and classical subjects, but his public career was effectively destroyed when his homosexuality became public knowledge in 1873. Solomon is recognized today, however, as an important and influential figure in the Pre-Raphaelite circle.

Following on from the success of Bloomsbury at Home, Pamela Todd turns her attention to the fiery group of young artists, designers and thinkers, led by the charismatic figure of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, which, in 1848, came together as the semi-secret Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. She explores their personalities and work through the places and haunts they made their own, presenting an intimate view of an important section of the avant-garde artistic community and placing it firmly in its Victorian context. The Pre-Raphaelites at Home is a book about personality and place. Biographies of each of the extensive cast of characters open the book, followed by a chronology of the significant events affecting the group over more than 60 years. In the succeeding chapters Rossetti, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Thomas Woolner are joined by William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and their intimate circle. Place by place, we are led through the story of subtly shifting allegiance, of love and deaths, adultery and illness, as the angry young men became successful, and, in some cases, even respectable. The lively narrative, packed with quotation from their own work, is lavishly illust

Add your own color to 30 pre-Raphaelite masterpieces! A progressive group of mid-19th-century artists, the Pre-Raphaelites chose to create their work in the style of medieval and Renaissance painters before the time of Raphael. The other-worldly essence and idealistic spirituality of their art is showcased in this heady collection of Pre-Raphaelite renderings from the masters of the period: John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Evelyn de Morgan, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, and more. Each illustration awaits your colors from paintbrush, pencil, marker, or crayon.

The Pre-Raphaelite Movement began in 1848, and experienced its heyday in the 1860s and 1870s. Influenced by the then little-known Keats and Blake, as well as Wordsworth, Shelley and Coleridge, Pre-Raphaelite poetry 'etherialized sensation' (in the words of Antony Harrison), and popularized the notion ofl'art pour l'art - art for art's sake. Where Victorian realist novels explored the grit and grime of the Industrial Revolution, Pre-Raphaelite poems concentrated on more abstract themes of romantic love, artistic inspiration and sexuality. Later they attracted Aesthetes and Decadents like Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and Ernest Dowson, not to mention Gerard Manley Hopkins and W.B. Yeats.

This illustrated book focuses on the Pre-Raphaelite artists and their radical departure from artistic conventions. Barringer explores the meanings encoded in Pre-Raphaelite paintings and analyses key pictures and their significance within the complex social and cultural matrix of 19th century Britain.

Their Bohemian lifestyle and intertwined love affairs shockingly broke 19th Century class barriers and bent the rules that governed the roles of the sexes. They became defined by love triangles, played out against the austere moral climate of Victorian England; they outraged their contemporaries with their loves, jealousies and betrayals, and they stunned society when their complex moral choices led to madness and suicide, or when their permissive experiments ended in addiction and death. The characters are huge and vivid and remain as compelling today as they were in their own time. The influential critic, writer and artist John Ruskin was their father figure and his apostles included the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the designer William Morris. They drew extraordinary women into their circle. In a move intended to raise eyebrows for its social audacity, they recruited the most ravishing models they could find from the gutters of Victorian slums. The saga is brought to life through the vivid letters and diaries kept by the group and the accounts written by their contemporaries. These real-lie stories shed new light on the greatest nineteenth-century British art.

Essentially a domestic biography whose main concern is the tragicomedy of manners enacted by a closely knit group of friends and lovers, Wives and Stunners tells the story of Janey Morris, Georgie Burne-Jones, Lizzie Siddall, Effie Gray and less well-known, Marie Spartali, Aglaia Coronio and Mary Zambacco. These women were the wives, mistresses andmuses, of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the inspiration behind the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and John Millais. Set against the background of mid-Victorian bohemian England, Henrietta Garnett vividly evokes the world they inhabited and the lives they lived. She recounts the romances and friendships between the artists and the 'stunners' in a lively and original way and her book will appeal to anyone interested in Victorian England, the history of the Pre-Raphaelites and, significantly, to everyone who wants to read a spellbinding story of a bygone era.