Pre-Raphaelites, Victorian Avant-Garde
I'm in London and recently went to see the extensive Pre-Raphaelite exhibition at Tate Britain , entitled Pre-Raphaelites, Victorian Avant-Garde. I’ve been a huge fan of this school since I was a teenager so it was a thrilling experience. I saw my favorite John Everett Millais painting, Ophelia “in person” for the first time and felt quite overwhelmed by the attention to detail, the vibrant quality of the color and the emotional connection it engenders. Ophelia is such a terribly tragic Shakespearean figure, driven out of her mind when her father is murdered by her lover Hamlet, she drowns herself in a stream. However, I couldn't help but think about Millais' poor model, Lizzie Siddal, lying in a bath filled with water for so many hours that she caught a bad cold. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed in London in 1948 as a way to express the artists’ dissatisfaction with the drawing style being advocated by the Royal Academy Schools. For them, it wa