The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood shook the mid-19th-century art world. Effectively Britain’s first modern art movement, the Brotherhood combined rebellion and revivalism, scientific precision, and imaginative grandeur. Today, the works of the Pre-Raphaelites are among the best known of all English paintings, and yet they have often been dismissed or misunderstood as Victoriana or escapism. This fascinating book convincingly corrects that view, examining works in a wide variety of media and demonstrating the broad scope of the movement’s revolutionary ideas about art, design, and society.
Led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais, the Pre-Raphaelites’ unflinchingly radical style, inspired by the purity of early Renaissance painting, defied convention, provoked critics, and entranced audiences. Many of their most famous paintings are featured, including Millais’s Ophelia and Ford Madox Brown’s The Last of England. This book also includes sculpture, photography, and the applied arts, the last of which shows the important role the Brotherhood played in the early development of the Arts and Crafts movement and the socialist ideas of the poet, designer, and theorist William Morris.

Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design

Arts & Photography

Smith, Alison

Barringer, Tim

Rosenfeld, Jason

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

John Everett Millais (1829 - 1896) was one of the most significant English painters of the nineteenth century, successful and respected during his career, honoured as the first painter to be created a baronet, he remains, as recent exhibitions of his work have demonstrated, equally well known today. Whilst his substantial contributions are rarely, if ever, denied, in past art historical accounts of Millais's long career there has been an unfortunate tendency to superficially distinguish between the early promise of his Pre-Raphaelite masterpieces and the perceived commercial and traditionalist orientation of his later works. In this new study of the artist's life and work Rosenfeld argues that such readings are far from accurate, demonstrating that the development of Millais's art was at the forefront of contemporary painting throughout his life. At the same time as Manet and Monet were liberating their nation's art from traditional forms and subjects, Millais was leading British art with the bravura manner and looser symbolic associations of Aestheticism (the most important movement after Pre-Raphaelitism), which in turn influenced the portraits of John Singer Sargent and the landscapes of Vincent Van Gogh.

John Everett Millais

Individual Artists

Phaidon Press

"Bats, nurses, Marlene Dietrich, a malevolent figure in a bear suit, two cowboys playing king-of-the-mountain on a rosebush, a group of men placidly eating babies at a makeshift picnic table, while, above them, a tree grows more babies: Marcel Dzama is back. As readers will learn in The Course of Human History Personified, he's a sleepwalker, a sleepdrawer--""I draw during the day, but the ideas come at night."" He records his visions in a bedside-table notebook. The finished work, in ink and watercolor, in a limited color scheme, against empty backgrounds, stripped of narrative context, offers many possible interpretations. Its cast of characters is expansive and in each drawing their roles become more complex and defined. Dzama's influences include Blake, Goya, Botticelli, and James Ensor and his sources encompass native mythology, Inuit art, Dante's Divine Comedy, medieval paintings and American folklore. The title, The Course of Human History Personified, is borrowed from Dante and recalls the grandiose artistic and literary cycles of the nineteenth century such as Thomas Cole's 1836 The Course of Empire, where nature plays as large a role as humans. Here nature is personified--imagined characters and trees and beasts assume base human characteristics. If it's a dark view of the world, it's also an entrancing one."

Marcel Dzama: The Course of Human History Personified

Tougaw, Jason

David Zwirner

The first -- and highly anticipated -- monograph on one of the most influential painters of our time Cecily Brown is a British-born, New York-based artist who rose to prominence in the late 1990s. Brown established her unique voice within the art sphere by investigating the sensual qualities of oil paint and challenging the conventions of abstraction and figuration. Through a range of reference to old master paintings, Abstract Expressionism, and popular culture, Brown's symbolic language, exuberant brushwork, rich palette, intense energy, and embrace of the erotic have redefined some of painting's historical canons.

Cecily Brown (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Prose, Francine

Martin, Courtney J.

Humor & Entertainment

Shahzia Sikander (Contemporary Painters Series)

Lund Humphries

A society of young artists and writers, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in London in 1848 to rebel against the classical academic painting conventions of the day in favor of a meeting of medieval romanticism and new realism. Inspired by the theories of art critic John Ruskin, who urged artists to “go to nature,” Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and other artists created works predominantly dealing with religious themes, love, death, and subjects from literature and poetry. Fully illustrated, this book is an accessible introduction to the popular movement.

Pre-Raphaelites (Tate Introductions)

Tate

As a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, John Everett Millais (1829-1896) spearheaded one of the most radically modern artistic groups in the history of British art. Later in his career, Millais was considered an establishment figure who swapped artistic innovation for commercial gain. For the first time, this book allows us to see Millais in the context of his whole career, arguing that his late works, especially his landscapes, are as dramatic in their freshness of vision as those of his Pre-Raphaelite period. He is revealed as a complex artist with significant links to Manet, Whistler, and Sargent; and one who helped to spark a renewed interest in British eighteenth-century art.

Millais

Tate Publishing

Nava’s playful update of history painting forges “new myths” for our times 
This is the first monograph on New York–based artist Robert Nava (born 1985), who paints using a raw, energetic mixing of spray paint, acrylics and grease pencil. Nava’s paintings of fantastical, hybrid beasts, angels and monsters exude a playful candidness that invites viewers to reconnect with the unbridled imagination of their childhoods. Nava’s strongly contemporary aesthetic is deeply rooted in art history and the tradition of monumental history painting. 
Focusing on Nava's first exhibition in London, this fully illustrated book includes his new series of large-scale battle scene paintings featuring a chimerical world of metamorphic creatures, drawing inspiration from sources as disparate as prehistoric cave paintings, Egyptian art and cartoons. A text by art historian Jason Rosenfeld and an interview with renowned sculptor Huma Bhabha also feature. With photographs of Nava's sketchbooks and the artist working in his studio, this book is a personal and comprehensive view of his work and process.

Robert Nava

Pace Publishing

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Books by Rosenfeld, Jason