Pre-Raphaelites in Britain and America

Yale University Professor of Art History Tim Barringer will explore the radical artistic practices of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in Britain and its American counterpart, the artists associated with the New York journal The New Path, which was dedicated to the “Advancement of Truth in Art.” The English painters John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti turned their back on academic art-making by returning to what they believed to be the truth and sincerity of early Italian painting. As the movement developed, it embraced a form of hyperrealism influenced by emerging technology. In America, a group of artists including William Trost Richards, John William Hill and Thomas Charles Farrer pioneered a distinctly American variant of Pre-Raphaelite realism, dedicated to the truthful delineation of the flora and landscape of the New World.

Tim Barringer is the Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. His books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (1999; new edition, 2012) and Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (2005). He co-authored American Sublime,and co-edited Art and the British Empire and Art and Emancipation in Jamaica. He is currently completing a book, Broken Pastoral: Art and Music in Britain, Gothic Revival to Punk Rock, and is co-curator of Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (Tate, London 2012, Washington, Moscow and Tokyo 2013).