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(narrator) The Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource.
Trace an extraordinary movement that changed the face of British art.
Pre-Raphaelitism was Britain's most significant and influential
19th-century art movement.
Founded in 1848, it centred on a group of three young artists -
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt.
These artists wanted to revive English art
by turning away from the old studio tradition
and bringing painting into direct contact with nature.
The largest collection of their work,
which has never before been comprehensively documented
and accessible as a whole,
is now available to search and view
through the Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource open-access website.
Exploring this radical movement throughout its history,
visitors can follow the thoughts of a pre-Raphaelite artist
through his or her initial sketches and scribbles
to working drawings, detailed studies,
and through to the final oil painting.
And it's not just art works by the founders
of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
among the wealth of material now on offer,
says Rachel Crockett of Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery,
which holds the collection.
We're digitising the entire pre-Raphaelite collection
for the first time.
And it's going to include works by some really well-known artists
like Edward Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown, Holman Hunt,
and also some lesser-known artists like Simeon Solomon
and James Campbell.
Artists either who were part of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
or associated with the pre-Raphaelites.
It'll also include works people may not think of as pre-Raphaelite,
like work by William Morris,
who collaborated a lot with Edward Burne-Jones.
There'll be oil paintings, works on paper, artists' preparatory works.
There was often some quite, sort of... soft-focus drawings,
preparation for oil paintings.
There's books, printed material,
and also we've got furniture,
we've got a dress made out of William Morris fabric.
There really is objects and items
going across the full pre-Raphaelite history,
right from the beginning of the Brotherhood in 1848
to the end of the 19th century.
(narrator) While the oil paintings in the Birmingham Museums collection
have been on display in its galleries
and loaned to museums around the world,
until now drawings such as these have not been widely available.
Researchers have been able to access them in the museum print room,
but it required an appointment
and for the curator to be available to stay with the visitor.
The drawings are delicate.
Many are on scrappy bits of paper torn from sketch books.
And the more people who have access to the originals,
the greater the likelihood of damage.
Now everyone can look at the drawings at any time,
and as a high-resolution image
rather than a fragile and faint pencil sketch.
This sketch, for the face of the angel
who can be seen in Burne-Jones's enormous watercolour painting
of the star of Bethlehem,
was drawn in red-and-white chalk on brown paper
and is distinguished by the intensity of the colour.
The Pre-Raphaelite Resource site
features many hundreds of preparatory drawings like this,
and they help to reveal the mindset of the artist
as he or she works through ideas
and plans what to include in the final painting.
Edward Burne-Jones's "Pygmalion" series,
which is in the collection,
can give us an insight into the process, explains Rachel Crockett.
Pygmalion was a Cypriot sculptor in Greek myth,
and he was always searching for the perfect woman.
And he decided he couldn't find the perfect woman
so he'd actually sculpt her.
And then when he'd done his sculpture
he was so entranced he actually wanted her to come to life,
so he prayed to the gods and she came to life.
Burne-Jones did a series of drawings and then a series of paintings
of Pygmalion in his studio doing his sculpture
and then of her coming to life.
And we have a series - four of these paintings.
There's one other series with the same subject,
in the collection of Andrew Lloyd Webber.
But what we also have... We've always displayed the series.
What we've rarely displayed is the drawings that we've got
that are all the preparatory work that Burne-Jones did
before he actually did the paintings.
So we've got quite a lot of quite rough sketches
that show some of the same scenarios that are in the painting.
But there are small differences,
so the studio behind Pygmalion, the sculptor, is different.
You can see that he's trying to get the perspective just right.
And then you get the next series of sketches -
there's more perspective, they're much closer to the final paintings.
And then you can go from those to the painting,
and you can see the mindset of the artist
as he works through his ideas
and comes to a final decision before he actually starts the paintings.
And it shows how an artist actually does plan what they do.
It's not spontaneous. There's a lot of planning behind these paintings,
to get four finished works that are commonly presented together.
(narrator) The easy-to- use-and-search website
features a set of learning resources
demonstrating how the collection can be used by teachers and lecturers.
And, says Rachel Crockett,
the pre-Raphaelite movement is relevant to a range of subject areas
across the academic spectrum.
Well, it won't just actually help art historians.
It will help a lot of people across the education community.
So it's of interest to art historians, certainly,
but also people studying the 19th century,
people studying literature -
the pre-Raphaelite artists did a lot of illustration for poets,
particularly people like Byron, Dante, Tennyson.
So a lot of these images were used and re-used,
printed up by William Morris.
And also the pre-Raphaelites themselves wrote poetry.
Rossetti himself wrote and illustrated a lot of his own poetry.
He was very influenced by the medieval poets like Chaucer.
Literature's a really big focus,
much bigger than we thought when we started the research.
It's also gonna be a resource for art students, to look at the images.
And the images themselves are really important to the resource.
In a way we want them to drive the resource.
There'll be a lot of cataloguing information about them
and information that's not been made available previously,
because in many cases we didn't know that information ourselves.
(narrator) The Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource is brought to you by JISC,
the Joint Information Systems Committee,
with the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.
Captions by internetsubtitling.com