Jonty Claypole

One is called Ford Maddox Brown.

Another is called William Holman Hunt.

And another is called John Everett Millais.

They decide to form a movement, an artistic movement.

We were talking last week about how the Cockney School of Poetry that was being pushed or being expressed to the public around Keats was the first time that young artists were packaged for public consumption as a movement.

And Dante Rossetti and his friends, they were obsessed by Keats.

And I think they're very consciously building on that.

They decide to form a movement that...

They're also inspired by the revolutions of 1848.

It's no accident that they do this in the same year.

So in 1848, revolutions have been happening in countries all around Europe.

And so they're thinking, what is the artistic response to this?

What is the artistic revolution?

or the artistic equivalent of the revolution.

They're also very inspired by the Chartist movement in England, which is the working class workers movement.

And the conceit that they hit upon is basically they decide they don't really like much art since the time of Raphael in the Italian Renaissance.

After Raphael, everything becomes very mannered.

artists start to separate from nature and they want to get back to the era of the Renaissance before Raphael, when artists were very closely observing nature.

And that's why they call themselves the Pre-Raphaelites.

They latch on to a young John Ruskin as a theorist for this movement.