It was founded by three students of the Royal Academy: John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Holman Hunt— ages nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one, respectively. The group's intention was to reform art by rejecting what they considered to be the mechanistic approach adopted by the Renaissance and Mannerist artists who followed Raphael and Michelangelo. They believed that the Classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on academic teaching of art.
Pre-Raphaelite paintings often addressed subjects of moral seriousness, whether pertaining to history, literature, religion, or modern society.
In 1850, Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti found the journal The Germ, in which they divulge the theories of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
Pre-Raphaelite
