The story of how a group of precocious young artists shook up the British art establishment, told through their works, letters and diaries. An illustrated history of the linked lives and loves of a group of supremely talented artists of late Victorian Britain through their passionate writings. It features the painters, poets, critics and designers: Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, Fanny Cornforth, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, William and Janey Morris, Christina, Dante Gabriel, and William Rossetti, John Ruskin, William Bell Scott and Lizzie Siddal. The artistic aspirations and achievements of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood are revealed alongside the interwoven dramas of their personal lives, in letters, diaries and reminiscences, while their genius is displayed in vivid paintings, drawings, designs and poems. The Pre-Raphaelites was a charmed circles of love, friendship and art. Within an ever-changing flow of affections, and intimacies as richly patterned as a tapestry, they worked together as companions, lovers and partners. They shared tragedy as well as happiness, critical hostility as well as success, even the griefs of infidelity and discord. These creative partnerships, which also created the firm William Morris and Co, revitalised Victorian art and design. The new edition publishes in time for the start of the Burne Jones Exhibition at Tate Britain, starting in October 18. It is a vital book in understanding the Pre-Raphaelite art, which remains as popular and moving as ever.

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.

The story of how a group of precocious young artists shook up the British art establishment, told through their works, letters and diaries. An illustrated history of the linked lives and loves of a group of supremely talented artists of late Victorian Britain through their passionate writings. It features the painters, poets, critics and designers: Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, Fanny Cornforth, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, William and Janey Morris, Christina, Dante Gabriel, and William Rossetti, John Ruskin, William Bell Scott and Lizzie Siddal. The artistic aspirations and achievements of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood are revealed alongside the interwoven dramas of their personal lives, in letters, diaries and reminiscences, while their genius is displayed in vivid paintings, drawings, designs and poems. The Pre-Raphaelites was a charmed circles of love, friendship and art. Within an ever-changing flow of affections, and intimacies as richly patterned as a tapestry, they worked together as companions, lovers and partners. They shared tragedy as well as happiness, critical hostility as well as success, even the griefs of infidelity and discord. These creative partnerships, which also created the firm William Morris and Co, revitalised Victorian art and design. The new edition publishes in time for the start of the Burne Jones Exhibition at Tate Britain, starting in October 18. It is a vital book in understanding the Pre-Raphaelite art, which remains as popular and moving as ever.

Jane Austen's stories of clever women, elusive love, and social mores have struck a chord with millions of fans who consider her work compelling, heartwarming, and essential. Adapted time and time again for screen and stage, these enduring classics remain as enjoyable as ever, the perfect addition to every home library. This revised, elegant edition collects Austen's acclaimed novels "Sense and Sensibility," "Pride and Prejudice," "Emma," and "Northanger Abbey." New readers will be enchanted once they open the genuine leather cover, see the specially designed end papers, and read these brilliant stories, while readers familiar with Austen's genius will enjoy the introduction from an acclaimed Austen scholar that provides background and context for the works they've always loved. Just like Jane Austen's memorable characters, readers will fall in love--with this remarkable keepsake!

Oxford has a special place in the history of Pre-Raphaelitism. Thomas Combe (superintendent of the Clarendon Press) encouraged John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt at a crucial early stage of their careers, and his collection became the nucleus of the Ashmolean collection of works by the Brotherhood and their associates. Two young undergraduates, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, saw the Combe collection and became enthusiastic converts to the movement. With Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in 1857 they undertook the decoration of the debating chamber (now the Old Library) of the Oxford Union. The group's champion John Ruskin also studied in Oxford, where he oversaw the design of the University Museum of Natural History and established the Ruskin School of Drawing. Jane Burden, future wife of Morris and muse (probably also lover) of Rossetti, was a local girl, first spotted at the theatre in Oxford. Oxford's key role in the movement has made it a magnet for important bequests and acquisitions, most recently of Burne-Jones's illustrated letters and paintbrushes. The collection of watercolors and drawings includes a wide variety of appealing works, from Hunt's first drawing on the back of a tiny envelope for The Light of the World (Keble College), to large, elaborate chalk drawings of Jane Morris by Rossetti. It is especially rich in portraits, which throw an intimate light on the friendships and love affairs of the artists, and in landscapes which reflect Ruskin's advice to 'go to nature'. More than just an exhibition catalog, this book is a showcase of the Ashmolean's incredible collection, and demonstrates the enormous range of Pre-Raphaelite drawing techniques and media, including pencil, pen and ink, chalk, watercolor, bodycolor and metallic paints. It will include designs for stained glass and furniture, as well as preparatory drawings for some of the well-known paintings in the collection.

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.

A magnificent new book on the Pre-Raphaelites—oversized, gorgeously illustrated, and packed with insight Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt. These were among the young British artists who, in the revolutionary year of 1848, set out to return a lost vibrancy to European art. Calling themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, they and their later followers—including Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris—mounted an artistic front against what they saw as the confining standards of the Victorian art world, and the dehumanizing aspects of the industrial age. Their works drew on Shakespeare, Keats, Tennyson, and medieval lore. They also treated religious and contemporary themes with striking realism, bringing viewers into intimate contact with the subject and causing scandal in their time. In this authoritative yet highly readable volume, art historian Aurélie Petiot traces Pre-Raphaelitism from its beginnings as a secret brotherhood to its dissemination in multiple strands of British art and beyond. Petiot offers keen analyses of Pre-Raphaelite painting, drawing, and decorative art alike. She gives particular attention to the role of women in the movement, not only as models and muses, but as pioneering artists in their own right, whose work has only begun to receive its proper recognition. Uniquely, the last chapters of the book are devoted to the enduring (yet often underestimated) Pre-Raphaelite influence on the later course of modern art and on our contemporary culture. More than 300 full-color illustrations reproduce all the great Pre-Raphaelite masterpieces, as well as many fascinating lesser-known works, with all the luminous brilliance and detail for which the Pre-Raphaelites are renowned. This splendid volume is a must-have for any art history lover.

The National Portrait Gallery's Character Sketches series provides biographical sketches of a specific group of historical figures from the Gallery's collection of portraits. Each volume examines the public images and private faces, the characters and relationships that gave each group its identity and importance. Introductions to each volume give a comprehensive account of the lives featured from a critical perspective. Journals, letters, diaries, anecdotes, poems and novels are all used to create portraits in words as well as images. This issue focuses on the pre-Raphaelites.

The Illustrated Letters of the Brontës is the story both of the real world of the Brontës at Haworth Parsonage, their home on the edge of the lonely Yorkshire moors, and of the imaginary worlds they spun for themselves in their novels and poetry. Wherever possible, their story is told using their own words – the letters they wrote to each other, Emily and Anne's secret diaries, and Charlotte's exchanges with luminaries of literary England – or those closest to them, such as their brother Branwell, their father Patrick Brontë, and their novelist friend Mrs Gaskell. The Brontës sketched and painted their worlds too, in delicate ink washes and watercolours of family and friends, animals and the English moors. These pictures illuminate the text as do the tiny drawings the Brontë children made to illustrate their imaginary worlds. In addition, there are facsimiles of their letters and diaries, paintings by artists of the day, and pictures of household life. It is a unique and privileged view of the real lives of three women, writers and sisters.