Date of Award

8-8-2017

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Art

First Advisor

Floyd Martin

Abstract

When they came together in 1848, the Pre-Raphaelites sought to revolutionize art in England. They tried for a “truth to nature” in their aesthetic rather than the idealized pictures seen in the Royal Academy. These artists found inspiration in the poetry of John Keats and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, taking ideas found in their poems and turning them into visual stories that also addressed social issues in Victorian England. These subjects often appealed to a number of artists working in their style who took characteristics they liked from fellow artists and expanded on them, creating an ever-evolving foundation of images from which to draw. The Pre-Raphaelites worked in vivid colors and highly naturalistic figures, taking the poetry of Keats and Tennyson, and infusing it with their own styles to form modern compositions filled with the highly-detailed imagery for which they are now known.

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