| As one of the first avant-garde art movement, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood challenged prevailing artistic traditions in the middle of the nineteenth century. The group's principle members --- Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt and John Millais --- rebelled against the prevailing sentimental academic tradition, seeking a style that demanded a close study of nature, bright color palette and attention to detail; this style was seen as a returned to the art produced before Raphael Sanzio and the High Renaissance, providing their eponymous name. While both contemporaneous and modern writers have maintained that the critical misfortune of the group lay primarily in their rejection of formal artistic principles, especially those espoused by the British Royal Academy, this thesis will argue that it was, in fact, the group's choice of subject matter that aroused the ire of the middle-class male population. The taboo topic of the fallen woman thrust into the spotlight during a period seen as plagued by an epidemic of prostitution, coupled with a fear of disease and loose morals, and illustrated with the use of plebian models was a shock to the sentimental prudery of Victorian society. Moreover, the sympathy of the group's members for the plight of the fallen woman, seen in their unabashed affairs with women of ill-repute and obsessions with their low-class models, made them outcasts in many British circles. As will be argued, the significance of the group' efforts is not merely stylistic, as their rejection was not: the deep-seeded fear of the Victorian whore found an alternative voice with the group that sought to also re-evaluate her place in society and how she arrived there. |
