Neo-Pre-Raphaelitism: The Final Generations

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of seven young men who wanted to rebel against the teachings and orthodoxies of the Royal Academy. It was a short-lived movement, beginning in 1848 and ending in the early 1850s, but this dissertation will argue that their influence lived on and inspired a group of artists who were working at the turn of the century and well into the twentieth-century. This dissertation is unprecedented; it is the first publication which aims to specifically categorize certain artists whose oeuvres are indebted to various generations of Pre-Raphaelitism. In short, I am characterizing these artists and thereby dubbing them "Neo-Pre-Raphaelite," channeling an early twentieth-century description of some of these artists. The most obvious reason to refer to them by this term is that they are stylistically and/or thematically linked to members of the original PRB or later generations / manifestations of Pre-Raphaelitism. The individuals on whom I am focusing are all British and produced Pre-Raphaelite inspired work from roughly 1895-1950. Consequently, the parameters within which I am working are threefold; firstly, the artists were exhibiting in the late 1880s/1890 - 1920 (a Neo-Pre-Raphaelite period that overlapped for most of them); secondly, those whose work echoed that of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; and thirdly, persons having a working relationship with Edwin Austin Abbey-an American artist who was in a unique position to be a hybrid between the earlier PRB and these younger artists. Accordingly, the investigated artists are: Frank Cadogan Cowper, John Liston Byam Shaw, Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, John William Waterhouse, and Thomas Cowper Gotch. There is an additional investigation that establishes a Neo-Pre-Raphaelite classification which could exist outside of Abbey. This alternate combination was directly connected to Pre-Raphaelitism through Edward Burne-Jones, and demonstrated a visual indebtedness to both the Pre-Raphaelites and the artist-these devotees applied the unique Burne-Jonesian style to favorite subjects of the PRB. For the purposes of this dissertation, this supplementary circle has been termed "outliers"-in that they met the same aforementioned criteria but did not share an alliance with Abbey-including: Marie Spartali Stillman, Kate Bunce, Evelyn Pickering de Morgan, Sidney Meteyard, and John Melhuish Strudwick.