The Pre-Raphaelites for NGA Kids

Many of the amazing works of art in Love & Desire: Pre-Raphaelite Masterpieces from the Tate normally live at the Tate in London. They have a cool place online called Tate Kids with lots of fun activities and things to do. We have re-imagined some of the activities to explore how the Pre-Raphaelites connect to Australia and works of art from the national collection, held here at the NGA.

The Pre-Raphaelites (try saying it like this: Pre-raf-e-light) were a group of artists working in England during the Victorian era. They believed art should be like the real world. They wanted their paintings to show the world with lots of details, intense colours and scenes of life.

At that time in England many people admired the work of the Italian painter Raphael. Raphael was painting nearly 400 years before the Pre-Raphaelites. He liked creating epic religious paintings, and imagined these scenes to be very beautiful. The Pre-Raphaelites didn’t like this and wanted to paint what they knew. This is how they got their name—it literally means ‘before Raphael’.

They were rebels in their time

In the mid-1800s if you wanted to become a successful artist in England, you needed to belong to the Royal Academy of Art. They decided who was a good artist and who was not. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood thought this was a bit rubbish. The Pre-Raphaelites wanted to challenge what art people thought was ‘good art’.

Robert Braithwaite Martineau The last day in the old home 1862

They wanted to paint pictures of religious subjects, legends and myths in a style that reminded people of medieval painters. This caused quite a scandal. They were like a punk rock band your parents wouldn’t approve of. Now many people love the work of the Pre-Raphaelites and travel across the world to see them in exhibitions such as this one.

Looking at a Pre-Raphaelite painting is like solving a puzzle—there is so much to see and find. The detail is incredible, and the paintings are full of symbols and objects with meanings.

William Holman Hunt The awakening conscience 1853

Take a look at William Holman Hunt’s painting The awakening conscience. We see a woman rising from where she has been sitting on a man’s lap. The scene around her shows clues as to how she feels. Can you see the cat toying with the injured bird? Or the tangled thread on the floor? All these little details are there to help you understand the story of the painting.

If you were going to paint a picture of a person you might consider adding different symbols to help tell the story of who the person is.

Many portraits depict the subjects surrounded by objects that have meaning in their lives. You might paint a book to show your subjects loves reading or a cat to show they love animals.

The painting shown below by Marshall Caxton is in the NGA's collection and was made in Australia around the same time that the Pre-Raphaelites were working. It shows that some artists in Australia depicted their subjects in similar ways to the Pre-Raphaelites.

The painting shows a family in their home in 1853. The clothes and the objects that the artist has chosen to include in this family portrait tell us a lot about them. Look how the young boy is close by his mum's side and holding his toy hoop, and the father is shown with his books and writing tools. Can you see his red slippers under the desk which show a relaxed and private side of this otherwise very formal portrait?  

Try and think of some objects that have meaning to you that you might include in a self-portrait.

Marshall Claxton Family group 1853

The Pre-Raphaelites studied their models very carefully to make sure they got their faces just right. For them proportion was very important when drawing faces. Look how John Everett Millais has painted the faces of a mother and her child here, with different proportions and qualities to show their ages.

John Everett Millais Mrs James Wyatt Jnr and her daughter Sarah c. 1850

You always have a handy model when you want to draw a portrait—just look in the mirror. Really look at your face before you put pencil to paper and think about your face shape and where your main features of eyes, nose and mouth are in relation to each other, and how they sit within your face shape.

When you start to draw, sketch very lightly so you can make decisions about the lines and marks you want to keep in the final work. You can also use light lines to divide up your face so you have a guide to line up your eyes and other features as you see them in the mirror.

Once you have your main features sketched in you can add details like hair and jewellery, and even some objects in the scene that tell people more about who you are.

Today photographic portraits are a common way of documenting people from all over the world, showing how they live and who they are. How many times have you had your photograph taken?

Nick Waplington (Girl looking into hand mirror) c. 1991

The Pre-Raphaelites took inspiration from fantasy and stories, but tried to make the scenes they painted look like real life. John Everett Millais painted Ophelia, who you might know as a character from William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.

John Everett Millais Ophelia 1851–52

Millais thought it was important that the stream looked real, so he spent five months painting the river, sometimes sitting there for eleven hours in one day!

The model for Ophelia was an artist called Elizabeth Siddal. She had to lie in a bath of water for many hours with candles burning underneath to keep her warm, so that Millais could make an accurate picture of a drowned woman.

The French sculptor Emile Bourdelle found inspiration in Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey from ancient Greece for his sculpture in the NGA’s Sculpture Garden, The sculpture is of Penelope, one of the main characters in the poem.

Emile Bourdelle Penelope 1912

Do you have a favourite story or poem which you'd like to draw? You could also look for a work of art on display inside the NGA or outside in the Sculpture Garden to use as inspiration to write your own poem.

This painting of the British Channel shows a body of water with sunlight streaming down from above. The artist John Brett was interested in conveying the power and beauty of nature. He has painted small boats­ in the vast ocean to show just how small humans are in the natural world.

John Brett The British Channel seen from the Dorsetshire Cliffs 1871

Many of the works of art in Love & Desire are created using oil paints, but if you have access to a camera in your phone or another device you could use photography to capture the world you see around you.

A great thing to do on a sunny afternoon is to go outside and to find a special place to use as a subject for a landscape (or seascape) image. You might even like to think about how the man-made and natural worlds might interact in unusual ways, like in this image by Australian artist Rosemary Laing. Be creative with capturing new ways to look at the landscapes you see around you, and think about how you can convey what you see and feel through your photographs.

Rosemary Laing flight research #6 1999–2000