The Pre-raphaelite Brotherhood Plaque

Haringey Erected 2019

Inscription

Elizabeth Siddal 1829-1862 Significant artist and poet with works at Wightwick Manor and the Ashmolean. She was painted by the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and was the model for Millais' painting Ophelia (1852) She is buried in Highgate Cemetery.

About This Blue Plaque

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and art critics founded in 1848. The three founding members were William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. They were later joined by William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Woolner to form the seven-member “brotherhood”.

The group’s intention was to reform art by rejecting what they considered to be the mechanistic approach first adopted by the Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo. They believed the Classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on the academic teaching of art. Hence the name “Pre-Raphaelite”.

In particular, they objected to the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the founder of the English Royal Academy of Arts. They called him “Sir Sloshua”, believing that his broad technique was a sloppy and formulaic form of academic Mannerism. In contrast, they wanted to return to the abundant detail, intense colours, and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian and Flemish art.

The Brotherhood’s early doctrines were expressed in four declarations: to have genuine ideas to express; to study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them; to sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parodying and learned by rote; and, most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.

The relevance to this location in Highgate Cemetery is that Elizabeth Siddal, who was an important model for many Pre-Raphaelite works and married to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, is buried here. Siddal embodied their ideals of beauty and appeared in many of their most famous paintings, including John Everett Millais’ iconic Ophelia (1852). In this way, Highgate Cemetery has become a site of pilgrimage for those fascinated by the Pre-Raphaelite movement and its muses.