Somewhere along the way, “Pre-Raphaelite” became shorthand for a look: abundant hair, pale skin, some moody greenery. A woman who seems to have wandered out of a medieval daydream and into your Pinterest feed.
I understand the appeal, but when we reduce the Pre-Raphaelites to solely an aesthetic, or a vibe, we miss the thing that made their work so unnervingly alive.
The Pre-Raphaelites weren’t a hairstyle. They were a worldview.
Their work shows us that attention is a form of honesty. That to really look at the details of, say, at a leaf, a thread, a stone, a face, was a form of truth telling. They treated nature not as backdrop but as a living language. A river wasn’t scenery; it was fate. A flower wasn’t decoration; it was biography. Objects carried consequence. Rooms held secrets. The world itself seemed to press in with meaning.
Myths, legends, Shakespeare, Arthurian romance, these weren’t merely escapism. They were serious material, charged with warnings and longings. Their paintings don’t merely “illustrate” a tale; they interrogate it. Who is being sanctified? Or being punished? Who is being turned into a symbol instead of allowed to be a person?
That last question matters more than ever, because the visual internet trades in symbols. A tragic girl. The beautiful woman framed as a mood, “Opheliacore,” the languid gaze, the hair like a halo. The Pre-Raphaelites gave us many of those visual templates.
Which is why we shouldn’t throw the aesthetic away. We should wake it up.
If we love Pre-Raphaelite beauty (and of course we do!) we can love it with our eyes open, looking past the hair and ask what the painting is teaching you about desire, virtue, power, punishment, and the cost of being seen. Let the art be both gorgeous and complicated. Roses with thorns.
We all know what it feels like when someone looks at us but fails to truly see us. The rush to interpret, to categorize, to narrate each other’s intentions creates a distance that doesn’t have much to do with reality, but everything to do with projection. And when someone misreads you, when their invented story becomes louder than your actual one, there can be a sting that catches you off guard.
Misunderstanding can feel like an erasure.
I think the Pre-Raphaelites understood this tension. The world saw Elizabeth Siddal‘s face, her hair, even her posture captured endlessly. She was frequently reshaped her into symbols, ideals, and myths. A drowning woman, a tragic muse, an emblem of beauty tinged with sorrow. But these images were never the whole truth. They were reflections of the people who painted her, not the woman herself.
I care not for my Lady’s soul Though I worship before her smile; I care not where be my Lady’s goal When her beauty shall lose its wile. Low sit I down at my Lady’s feet Gazing through her wild eyes Smiling to think how my love will fleet When their starlike beauty dies. I care not if my Lady pray To our Father which is in Heaven But for joy my heart’s quick pulses play For to me her love is given. Then who shall close my Lady’s eyes And who shall fold her hands? Will any hearken if she cries Up to the unknown lands?
Sometimes I think about that when modern life becomes loud, when people on social media decide who you are before knowing anything at all. It’s comforting, in a way, to realize we are not the first humans to face this. The misunderstanding is old; the ache is familiar.
But there’s another side to this story, one that feels gentler, more hopeful.
The ones who pause.
Who take time to ask.
Those who listen without sharpening their claws.
When someone truly sees your intentions, your humor, your hopes, your contradictions, you can feel as if you are welcomed home.
That’s the kind of seeing I want to practice more intentionally.
The soft kind. The curious kind. The kind that assumes complexity rather than malice.
The kind that remembers every person carries a thousand unspoken things.
You are not failing when others misunderstand you.
But when even a few people truly see you, they help make the rest bearable.
And maybe that’s all we can ask of each other, to try a little harder to see the person, not the projection.
Leave room for nuance.
Offer the kind of attention that feels like light and warmth rather than a searchlight.
Seen, even imperfectly, but not mistaken for someone we never were.
Beauty can be a slippery thing. It shifts as we age, evolves as the world changes, and often hides beneath layers of expectation we never meant to carry.
Yet more than 170 years ago, a small group of young artists barely out of their teens, glimpsed this struggle. In 1848, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood broke away from the conventions of Victorian art and turned toward a different vision: one steeped in honesty, emotion, and fearless beauty. And somehow, their lessons still feel startlingly modern.
Beauty Begins With Looking Closely
The Pre-Raphaelites believed that truth lived in the details. A single curl of hair, the glint of light on a glass vase, the veins of an ivy leaf.
Isabella and the Pot of Basil, William Holman Hunt
In a world that encourages us to scroll, skim, and rush, their work whispers a gentle rebellion: slow down.
Beauty can reveal itself when you take the time to actually look.
This isn’t just about art. It’s about the small joys we tuck into our days and the parts of ourselves we forget to notice. The Pre-Raphaelites remind us that beauty waits quietly and patiently for us to witness it.
Victorian ideals seem to have demanded a tight corset on everything, from bodies to behaviors and emotions. The Pre-Raphaelites loosened the laces. They painted women who looked real: weary, dreamy, fierce, wounded, complicated. Instead of polished elegance, they offered depth, interiority, and emotional truth.
In an era obsessed with filters and symmetry, their work suggests a radical counterpoint: beauty expands when perfection stops being the goal.
Freckles, softness, expression, sorrow, thoughtfulness… we recognize ourselves in these things more than in flawless surfaces.
Ophelia, Arthur Hughes
Beauty Is Story, Not Just Surface
Most Pre-Raphaelite paintings are a narrative. Ophelia doesn’t simply float among flowers; she carries centuries of grief and interpretation with her. Mariana doesn’t merely lean in a chair; she embodies waiting, longing, and resilience. Elizabeth Siddal isn’t just a model. She is a poet, an artist, a woman whose inner life shaped the very movement that immortalized her face.
Their art reminds us that beauty is not an aesthetic metric but a lived story.
Even our own reflection becomes richer when we remember the layers behind it, the experiences we’ve survived, the passions that shape us, the people we’ve loved, the creativity that pulls us forward.
La Ghirlandata, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Beauty Is a Conversation With the Past
The Pre-Raphaelites reached back to medieval tapestries, Arthurian legends, Shakespearean tragedies, and Renaissance texts. They found beauty not by chasing novelty but by entering into dialogue with history. In doing so, they built a bridge between eras, proof that beauty persists across centuries because it speaks to something unchanging in us.
Today, when trends rise and fall with dizzying speed, their work encourages a deeper kind of grounding. Beauty endures when we root it in something lasting, when it connects us to more than the moment in front of us Whether that’s art, literature, nature, spirituality, or personal history, the result is the same: a beauty that feels lived in rather than disposable.
The Defense of Guenevere, Jane Morris
We Create Beauty, We Don’t Simply Receive It
The Brotherhood didn’t wait to get permission from the artistic establishment, they feverishly strove to champion their message. They met frequently, worked hard, and debated fiercely to hone their ideas. No doubt they made mistakes, but always tried again. And they chose, deliberately, to create something that felt true rather than something that felt safe.
This is a powerful reminder today, where we see beauty presented as something to acquire through products, diets, or trends, rather than something to shape with our own hands.
The Pre-Raphaelites teach us that creativity is beauty. Curiosity is beauty. Craft is beauty. The act of making art, thought, or meaning is itself a form of self representation more honest than any mirror.
Proserpine, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Beauty Holds Both Light and Shadow
Pre-Raphaelite canvases glow with saturated color, luminous skin, and jewel-like natural details. Yet woven through that radiance is sorrow: Ophelia’s impending death, Proserpine’s captivity, the haunted longing of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s later work. Their beauty is never naive; it is beauty with full knowledge of darkness and melancholy.
Lachrymae, Lord Frederic Leighton
This feels especially relevant today, when many of us are learning to hold joy and grief simultaneously. The Pre-Raphaelites show us that beauty can contain sadness without collapsing. It can reflect the complexity of real life and still shimmer.
Beauty Is an Act of Paying Attention to Yourself
Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Elizabeth Siddal once wrote, “I care not for my lady’s soul / Though I worship before her smile.” She was pointing to a gaze that never moves beyond the surface; a lover who praises beauty yet ignores the woman’s mind, heart, and inner life. In The Lust of the Eyes, Siddal urges us to redirect that close, reverent attention inward: toward the soft places we neglect, the thoughts we quiet, the dreams we delay, the parts of ourselves that deserve to be seen with the same care we give to great works of art. To live with beauty today means to acknowledge yourself as a worthy subject.
I care not for my Lady’s soul Though I worship before her smile; I care not where be my Lady’s goal When her beauty shall lose its wile. Low sit I down at my Lady’s feet Gazing through her wild eyes Smiling to think how my love will fleet When their starlike beauty dies. I care not if my Lady pray To our Father which is in Heaven But for joy my heart’s quick pulses play For to me her love is given. Then who shall close my Lady’s eyes And who shall fold her hands? Will any hearken if she cries Up to the unknown lands?
Painting of Elizabeth Siddal by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Pre-Raphaelite paintings are not just relics of Victorian art; they are invitations.
Invitations to look closely.
To honor complexity.
Celebrate individuality.
Resist the flattening pace of modern life.
Allow beauty to be something lived rather than pursued.
More than a century later, they still teach us this:
Beauty is not what you perfect. Beauty is what you notice, what you create, and what you dare to see. Both in the world and within yourself.
Thanksgiving can be a complicated holiday here in America. For many, it’s a day of gratitude, connection, and familiar rituals; for others, it carries the weight of history, mythmaking, and stories that have been smoothed over until they no longer resemble the truth.
The holidays arrive as a season of gathering for some, a warm anticipation of family and tradition, while for others it sharpens the quiet ache of the loved ones who are no longer here to share the table.
The Convalescent, Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, Ford Madox Brown
I’ve been thinking about this duality lately. It’s a tension between celebration and clarity, and I found myself turning, as usual, to the Pre-Raphaelites.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were many things. Rebels, idealists, dreamers. But above all, they were committed to seeing clearly.
They painted nature not as polite background decoration but as something fierce, vivid, and honest. Every leaf in Ophelia, every seed in Proserpine‘s pomegranate, every folded petal in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s luminous portraits was rendered with an almost devotional attention.
For Pre-Raphaelite artists, beauty was not an escape from truth but a companion to it.
Proserpine, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
It strikes me that this approach might serve us well during Thanksgiving.
Rather than mythologizing the holiday, perhaps we can approach it the way the Pre-Raphaelites tried to approach the world around them: with honesty, reflection, and a desire to see clearly.
Seeing clearly doesn’t mean rejecting the comfort of the day. It simply means holding the whole picture, with its history, its contradictions, its beauty, as an invitation to pause.
It means acknowledging that gratitude and grief often share the same table.
Giving ourselves permission to feel the complexity of the season without flattening it to a single, tidy story.
And once we do that, we can practice a deeper gratitude. One that isn’t performative or perfunctory, but real:
Appreciation for the people who gather with us, whether in the flesh or in memory.
Gratitude for the small, ordinary beauties that sustain us.
Thankfulness for the true, complicated, and human stories that broaden our empathy and connect us to others across time and distance.
Autumn Leaves, Sir John Everett Millais
In this way, Thanksgiving can become less of a myth and more of a moment: a quiet place to stand, much like the figures in Millais’ Autumn Leaves, watching the old year burn down into embers and letting ourselves feel both the melancholy and the hope of what comes next.
This year, I’m choosing a Pre-Raphaelite Thanksgiving, not in decoration, but in spirit.
I want to move through the holiday with openness, clarity, and a willingness to sit with complexity, to notice the beauty in the smallest details, and to approach the day with artfulness, intention, and a kind of gentle, honest reverence.
Creation, Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones
May your Thanksgiving be whatever you need it to be this year: a gathering, a pause, a healing, a remembering.
I pray it will be full of truth, tenderness, and the courage to see clearly.
And may you find, as the Pre-Raphaelites so often did, that honesty and beauty are never at odds. They illuminate each other, even in the deepest season of the year.
