art should have a serious, moral purpose and often filled their work with symbols suggesting deeper meaning. Most of all, they believed in artistic excellence. To give their paintings a lighter, fresher look, they used bright colours and painted on a white canvas, rather than a brown one. While the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood lasted less than ten years as a group, other artists carried on with the style, which became broader and more muted in colour.
What to look for: subjects taken from the Bible, Shakespeare and the legend of King Arthur. Paintings exhibit meticulous detail, intense colours, tight handling of paint and complex compositions. Many works are highly realistic.
Impressionism (1860 – 1900)
The Impressionists were a group of French artists discontent with academic teaching, and who shared approaches, and techniques. They abandoned traditional formal compositions in favour of a more casual and less contrived arrangement of objects within a picture. The identifying feature of their work was an attempt to record a scene accurately, but without the use of traditional muted browns, greys, and greens in favour of a lighter, more brilliant palette. They stopped using greys and blacks for shadows, and used short (visible) brush strokes to produce flecks of unblended pure colours. They cast off literary and anecdotal subjects in favour of candid portrayals of ordinary people (doing regular things in everyday locations), landscapes, and architecture. Indeed, they rejected the role of imagination in the creation of works of art. Their name derives from a criticism of the first “impressionistic” work publicly displayed.
What to look for: paintings look