Category: 21st Century Thoughts

It may sound silly, but imagine Pre-Raphaelite artists using social media today.

The question reveals more than it first appears. Imagining Pre-Raphaelites on social media lets us consider that their work wasn’t just painting, but creating images with mood, persona, symbolism, and a sort of self-mythology. They weren’t merely making art; they were building worlds. This impulse remains relevant in today’s social media sphere, where we, too, construct identities and realities.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in 1848 by seven young artists and writers in England, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt. Their name showed they wanted to break away from what they saw as formulaic and boring academic rules in Victorian painting, and to return to the bright colors, detail, and honesty seen in Italian art before Raphael. This wasn’t just a small preference. It was a bold artistic movement.

From the start, they spread their work through letters, journals, exhibitions, reviews, patrons and personal networks. They built strong followings, and both shocked and charmed people. Essentially, they already recognized the power of a platform.

Rossetti would have thrived on Instagram. It brings together everything he loved: images, words, mood, and personality. He’d post close-up shots of rich fabrics, dreamy faces, and symbolic objects, with captions that felt like part poem, part challenge. Some themes would keep showing up. There would be a pomegranate. No one would really know why, and that mystery would make it even more interesting.

He would also be great at blending real life with performance. The Pre-Raphaelites cared deeply about beauty, but for them, beauty was never simply decoration. It was full of memory, medieval themes, desire, faith, sadness, and hints of stories. Social media loves this kind of layered symbolism. One picture can suggest a whole mood or set of values. Rossetti would get this right away, and he’d probably enjoy reading the comments, even if he acted like he didn’t.

Millais, on the other hand, might have had a trickier time with social media. His early paintings were extremely detailed and technically impressive, and he painted plants with careful accuracy. You can imagine him posting process videos that amaze viewers with their detail. Here’s the hem. Here’s the waterweed. Here are seventeen steps to painting a hand that turns out to be much harder than expected. He’d run the kind of account that makes people want to try oil painting, until they realize they don’t have the patience or sharp eyesight for it.

But Millais also shows us that public image can change. Over time, his style moved from the strict, detailed Pre-Raphaelite look to a bigger, more popular style. Today, some people might call that “selling out,” while others would say he was just adapting, making a living, and connecting with his audience. The debates would go on and on, and they’d be interesting.

Then there’s William Morris, who was close to the Brotherhood and would be a key part of this imagined social feed. Morris wouldn’t just share objects; he’d share his whole philosophy of making things. Textile patterns, fonts, wallpapers, manuscripts, workshops, dyes, labor, craft, and his dislike of ugly mass production would all show up. His account would start with beautiful images and finish with you thinking about industrial capitalism. You’d come for the wallpaper and leave questioning the meaning of everyday objects.

This thought experiment is more than just a playful idea. It helps us see what links the Pre-Raphaelites’ world-building to today’s platform culture. The Pre-Raphaelites worked where art, technology, mass reproduction, and public attention met during a time of big changes in Victorian Britain. Instead of rejecting modern life, they responded by creating new worlds inspired by imagination, craft, and historic styles. This careful balance between old and new is a lot like how we use social media now.

Today, many people use social media to build a different world, not just to talk to others. Sometimes this world feels supportive; other times, it’s just a shiny illusion, and often it’s both. We gather objects, values, and styles, and arrange them carefully to say: this is what I love, this is what I resist, this is who I am when it feels right. 

The Pre-Raphaelites knew that beauty is persuasive. Their art is rich, but never just about looks. Their images invite us to look deeper, using religion, literature, legend, and history to stir emotions. Social media works in a similar way: a carefully chosen image can show what matters, what’s desired, and who we are.

The Pre-Raphaelites knew both the appeal and the risks of focusing so much on aesthetics. Wanting to make life beautiful is a natural and worthy human urge. Noticing texture, color, symbols, and shapes isn’t silly, it’s a way of paying attention and saying the world has meaning, not just usefulness. I don’t want to give that up, and I doubt they would either.

But beauty, if left unchecked, can also become slippery. The Brotherhood’s world, full of symbols and longing, sometimes lets real women, work, and grief fade into the background. Their art gives us beauty but also a warning. Style can help us see things more clearly, or it can take over. It reminds us of the urge to turn feelings into mood boards before we really think about them.

So the real question isn’t just whether the Pre-Raphaelites would use social media, but how thinking about them helps us see the purpose and effects of how we build our own online selves.

They would probably remind us that social platforms reward intensity, recognizability, and myth, just like their art did. They would show how easily aesthetics turn into identity, and identity into performance. Most importantly, they would ask us to remember that decoration isn’t the enemy of truth. Sometimes, it lets truth sneak in quietly. In our fast-paced digital world, caring about thoughtful creation and genuine feeling can be a form of resistance.

The Pre-Raphaelites would have done well online for the same reasons they did in paint and print: they believed details and stories mattered, and that surfaces could hold meaning. They would have chosen what to share carefully, maybe even shared too many symbols. And they definitely would have posted lots of lilies.

And maybe, after all the velvet, clever captions, and medieval style, they would leave us with one simple lesson: whether you’re an artist or just scrolling, mean what you share. Don’t let the performance become more important than substance. That’s a good rule for both the Pre-Raphaelites and for us in our digital lives today.

Also see:

The women behind Rossetti’s paintings: a guide to his most frequent muses

Somewhere along the way, we learned a suspicious equation:

beauty = avoidance
joy = ignorance
aesthetic pleasure = moral failure

Art history disagrees.

The creation of art has rarely been a lounge chair on a sunny terrace. More often, it’s been a hand pressed to the wall in a burning building, testing for heat, searching for the exit, steadying the trembling. People have turned to images in plague years, war years, famine years, and exile years. Not because they were indifferent, but because the human psyche cannot metabolize catastrophe in a single sitting.

We do not live on truth alone. We live on truth with a pulse.

Beauty, then, isn’t a sugar coating.

It’s a nutrient.

It’s one of the ways we remain human while the world tries, daily, to render us numb.

Beauty as companionship, not denial

Behold: the modern feed, a corridor of sirens and screams. The news arrives like a tumultuous weather system. Uninvited, invasive, changing the pressure in the room. Many of us are walking around with a body that thinks it’s still in emergency mode: shoulders near the ears, jaw locked like a stubborn gate, breath held as if air must be rationed.

And then someone posts a painting. A small still life. A luminous face. A forest green drapery, a gold-edged sleeve. The comments split into two camps: How can you post this now? versus Thank you, I needed this.

I’m realizing that this is where Guggums lives: in the tender seam between those reactions. Not to arbitrate who is correct, but to ask a more useful question:

What if beauty isn’t a detour from reality, but a way to stay with it?

What if art, at its best, is not denial?
Perhaps it is companionship.

Community care isn’t always a grand sweeping movement. Sometimes it’s a “quiet room.”

When people say “community care,” we often imagine action: fundraising, organizing, showing up, building the infrastructure of survival. Yes. Absolutely. No argument from me; bring the banners, bring the water, bring the phone chargers.

But community care also includes something subtler: regulation.

A community of dysregulated nervous systems cannot sustain long-term work. If your body is constantly braced for impact, even your compassion will start to feel like a task you’re failing.

This is why we should make space for art.

Not art that says, “Everything is fine.”
Art that says, “You are here. I am here. Breathe with me.”

Companionship, not denial.

What the painters knew: the eye can be a lifeline

Let us wander back through a few centuries, as one does.

The medieval icon: a stare that holds you steady

Icons aren’t “pretty.” They are present. Their gold grounds do not mimic the world; they insist that another kind of reality is available, one where your suffering is seen without spectacle. The gaze is frontal, unwavering. Not entertainment. Not escape.

A companion.

The Dutch still life: attention as resistance

A lemon peel spirals. A wineglass catches light. The tablecloth wrinkles like a small landscape. In eras shadowed by death (and yes, the Dutch knew plague and war intimately), still lifes were not naive. They were meditations on time, fragility, and the holiness of the ordinary.

Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is look slowly.

The Pre-Raphaelite dream: beauty with a bruise

Those lush greens and medieval reveries? They weren’t just aesthetic indulgence. They were a protest against industrial brutality, against a world flattening into soot and speed. Their beauty wasn’t complacent; it was insistent.

Art doesn’t always solve. It often stays.

The difference between tone deaf and tender

So how do we share beauty without sounding like we’re handing someone a lavender-scented bandage for a broken bone?

Here’s the difference, distilled:

Tone deaf beauty says: “Look at this and stop feeling bad.”
Tender beauty says: “Look at this while you feel what you feel.”

Tone deaf beauty insists on a pivot.
Tender beauty offers a parallel lane.

Tone deaf beauty performs positivity.
Tender beauty practices presence.

Tone deaf beauty centers the poster’s comfort (“let’s keep it light!”).
Tender beauty centers the audience’s reality (“this is heavy; you’re not alone”).

If you want a rule you can carry in your pocket like a coin:

Do not use beauty to erase pain. Use beauty to accompany people who are in pain.

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.

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 a message. The world itself seemed to press in with meaning.

And they treated stories the same way.

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.

They also, if we’re honest, helped build the cage: the idea that beauty is virtue, that suffering is poetic, that women look best when they are luminous and still.

Just look at Millais’ Ophelia, or Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott. Women suspended in a moment of aestheticized tragedy, turned into icons of doomed grace. (See Pre-Raphaelite Women at The Victorian Web and the Pre-Raphaelite Collection at The Tate.)

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.

Because that’s the real inheritance.

Not the curls.

The way of seeing.