National Portrait Gallery Insights
New series

National Portrait Gallery Insights is a new series of illustrated books on literary and artistic personalities and themes, based on the collections of the National Portrait Gallery. Commissioned to demonstrate the significance of portraits when discussing history, art history and biography, each book has been beautifully designed by leading international design consultancy Pentagram Design and features over eighty exquisite stunning illustrations.

This innovative new series aims to explore the ways in which groups of people are drawn together - whether by birth, via education or through their artistic and intellectual vision - to make a powerful impact on cultural history. Written by well-known authors in their field, this exciting series provides a compelling way of exploring British history and biography.

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National Portrait Gallery Insights
The Pre-Raphaelite Circle
Jan Marsh

Renowned as much for their bohemian lifestyle as for their art, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood brought notoriety to British painting in the nineteenth century. The Pre-Raphaelites set out to reform contemporary art, to make it 'true to nature'. Yet their greater achievement was to revolutionise the idea of how contemporary artists should live, look and behave.

This book describes and illustrates the lives of the Pre-Raphaelites, revealing both their social relationships and artistic ideals. Born from the youthful enthusiasm of John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Brotherhood was founded as a semi-secret group committed to exposing the art of the Royal Academy as tired, trivial and 'sloshy'. Their pictures made an initial splash, inviting criticism as outlandish, ugly, crude and irreverent. But, from the start, their private lives - from the tragedy of Elizabeth Siddal's drug-induced demise to the triumph of Millais's appointment as President of the RA - attracted equal notoriety.

Jan Marsh's compelling account of these remarkable men and women uses their contemporary portraits to explore not only individual personalities, but also the artistic force that bound the circle together.

Jan Marsh is a writer specialising in biographies of artists and authors. In 1997 she co-curated the Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists exhibition in Manchester. In 2003 she was Leverhulme Fellow at the National Portrait Gallery, researching the Black Presence in Britain in the nineteenth century. She is currently writing a history of the Red House for the National Trust.

210 x 140mm, 108 pages
85 illustrations, 65 in colour
ISBN 1 85514 352 6
£9.99 (hardback)
Published May 2005

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All images and text are subject to copyright protection. 20 November 2008