The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was started in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, as a reaction against what they saw as the stale, formula-driven art produced by the Royal Academy at the time.

That was a group of English painters, poets and critics formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to reform art by rejecting practices of contemporary academic British Art. They have been considered the first avant-garde movement in art.

In Nutshell

Terminology
Term came from the group's desire to emulate painting styles that came before the illusionistic method perfected by the 16th century Italian Renaissance painter Raphael.
Artists
William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James Collinson, William Michael Rossetti, Frederick G. Stephens, and Thomas Woolner.
Timeline
1848-1854.
Started In
Great Britain.
About
Group of seven painters who formed a secret society in London. They believed that contemporary, academic painting had become decadent and debased. They sought to recapture the sincerity and simplicity of late medieval/early Renaissance art by imitating, to a certain extent, art that came "before Raphael." They also believed they could reform society through their art. The society signed many of their paintings "PRB," for Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They were defended by the critic John Ruskin.
Theme
The Bible, everyday life, English and classical literature, allegories of romantic love and tragedy
Art Style
Naturalistic; meticulous detail; and sharp focus
Known Work
HUNT, The Awakening Conscience, 1853.
ROSSETTI, Ecce Ancilla Domini, 1850.
Inspiration
Nazarenes (early 19th cent. German painters in Rome with similar aims), Ford Madox Brown, poets John Keats and Alfred Lord Tennyson, and carefully observed nature.
Become Inspiration Of
Edward Burne-Jones, Arts and Crafts Movement, and Symbolism.

Genuine Art
They aimed to go back to a more genuine art, exemplified as they saw it by the work of the Nazarenes, and rooted in realism and truth to nature.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brothers condemned high renaissance - art of idealization, and promoted works based on real landscapes and models, and paid intense attention to accuracy of detail and color. The combination of didacticism and realism characterized the first phase of the movement.

Exploring Art Style

"We begin by telling the youth of fifteen or sixteen that Nature is full of faults, and that he is to improve her; but that Raphael is perfection, and that the more he copies Raphael the better; that after much copying of Raphael, he is to try what he can do himself in a Raphaelesque, but yet original manner: that is to say, he is to try to do something very clever, all out of his own head, but yet this clever something is to be properly subjected to Raphaelesque rules, is to have a principal light occupying one seventh of its space, and a principal shadow occupying one third of the same; that no two people's heads in the picture are to be turned the same way, and that all the personages represented are to have ideal beauty of the highest order..." - John Ruskin:

Misdirected Worship of Raphael
It was in reaction to this misdirected worship of Raphael that the Pre-Raphaelites seem to have taken their name.

Their ideas were that for every scene a real unutilized landscape or interior should be painted, that every figure should be based on a real model with their real proportions, that the figures should be grouped without reference to any artistic arrangement, and that they should paint worthy subjects.

That is to say, as Ruskin had it, to avoid "Cattle-pieces and sea-pieces and fruit-pieces and family-pieces, the eternal brown cows in ditches, and white sails in squalls, and sliced lemons in saucers, and foolish faces in simpers."

They are generally bright - much more so than contemporary academic pictures - painted on a white ground. This gives them an instant impact when seeing them in a gallery among contemporary Victorian art.

Truth to Nature
The "truth to nature" apparent in attention to minute detail, to color, and sometimes a lack of grace in composition

Taste for Significant Subjects
Taste for significant subjects - from mediaeval tales, from poetry, from religion - bible stories, classical mythology, and nature. With technique of bright colors on a white background, they achieved great depth and brilliance. Later their work were not realistic with the mythological matter and medieval tales that they chose. They were envisioned in the mind and no reality outside of there. So they ended up closer to some other art revolution.

Brotherhood

Rossetti, Millais and Holman Hunt, Rossetti's brother William Michael Rossetti, Thomas Woolner, and two other students at the RA, James Collinson and Frederick George Stephens exhibited their work with the initials "P.R.B." (for Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood). Their Germ - journal attracted much criticism, especially from Charles Dickens. Later with support from John Ruskin who lead to their work being reconsidered in a more constructive way

Other artists working in the Pre-Raphaelite style in the 1850s included Ford Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes, Henry Wallis, Robert Braithwaite Martineau and William Windus.

Later, Rossetti inspired a new, younger generation of artists to follow the romantic, medieval type of painting which he himself produced, and these are also called Pre-Raphaelites, and sometimes referred to as the second generation.

Most notably they include Edward Coley Burne-Jones and William Morris, and later Simeon Solomon and Evelyn de Morgan.