William Holman Hunt (1827-1910), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) and John Everett Millais (1829-1896) founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1849. These passionate you men, who were all in their early twenties when they started the movement, rebelled against what they saw as the stale, formula-driven art produced by the Royal Academy at this time.

The original three recruited Rossetti's brother William Michael, the sculptor Thomas Woolner, and two other students of the RA; James Collinson and Frederick George Stephens. They began to exhibit their works with the mysterious initials PRB for a short time, which raised much speculation about the rebellious young artists. They had published a journal, The Germ, which ran for three issues and was one of the early magazines of our time. The Germ attracted much criticism, especially from Charles Dickens, before support from John Ruskin led to their work being reconsidered in a more favorable light.

In addition to the formal members of the PRB, other artists and writes formed part of a larger Pre-Raphaelite circle, including the painters Ford Maddox Brown, Charles Collins, Arthur Hughes and Henry Wallis, the poet Christina Rossetti, the artist and social critic John Ruskin, the sculptor-poet John Tupper and painter-poet William Bell Scott.

Collinson resigned in 1850 and was replaced by Walter Howell. However, the Brotherhood faded out quite quickly as its three main members went in different directions. Millais became a successful establishment painter and moved away from Pre-Raphaelite works to more popular subjects. Rossetti's work became more and more mystical and very individual. Last, Holman Hunt, while retaining the ideals, painted moralistic pictures that may be thought as gearing towards mainstream Victorian subjects.

Later, Rossetti inspired a new, younger generation of artists to follow the romantic, medieval type painting, which he himself produced. The most notable of those include Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, and later Simeon Solomon and Evelyn de Morgan. Many other artists who worked in a similar style, or somewhere between Pre-Raphaelitism and the aestheticism of Leighton were sometimes called Pre-Raphaelite.

The aim of the Pre-Raphaelites was to go back to what they called a purer form of art, rooted in realism and truth to nature, before the renaissance artist Raphael and his rules. To quote John Ruskin:

In laymen's terms, what Ruskin is saying that all paintings are to be subjected to Raphael's rules, and that it is no longer realism because it is no longer true to the fact that nothing is perfect and that they are no longer painting what their eyes see. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's ideas were for every scene, a real unidealized landscape or interior should be painted, that every figure should be based on a real model with their real proportion, and that those figure should be grouped without any reference to artistic arrangement, and they should paint worthy subjects.

Pre-Raphaelite pictures are generally bright, much more so than those contemporary academic pieces that had been painted on a white ground. The focus on "Truth to Nature" is readily apparent is attention to minute detail, color, and sometimes lack of grace in composition. The PRB also emphasized precise representation of all objects, particularly those in the immediate foreground, which was often left blurred or in the shade, thus violating conventional views of both proper style and subject. This sometimes gave the feel of surrealism to their paintings.

Following Ruskin, they attempted to transform the resultant hard-edge realism by combining with typological symbolism. At their most successful, the PRB produced a magic or symbolic realism.

The PRB drew upon the works of Shakespeare, Keats, and Tennyson for new subjects, as well as mythology and religion.

Although the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood did not last long, it had a lasting effect in modern art. John Ruskin once wrote that the Pre-Raphaelites might "lay the foundation of a school of art nobler than the world has seen for three hundred years."