The Pre-Raphaelites & The Birth of Modernism: Art History Reframed: Autumn 2025 Lecture Series

Art Historian Dr Matthew Whyte offers a new lecture series, which takes the audience on an art-filled journey through the often beautiful, sometimes scandalous, and always fascinating moments in the development of Western civilisation.

Week 1: The Pre-Raphaelites & The Birth of Modernism

In this first week, we explore the artists who looked back in order to move forward in the first breaths of modernism. Famously referred to as the Pre-Raphaelites, a name which these artists coined for themselves, the group looked back to the art of the Middle Ages as an act of resistance again the Royal Academy, whose control over artistic production and education was increasingly being perceived to be unjust. Pre-Raphaelite art draws inspiration from literature and nature, focusing on creating emotionally and spiritually evocative work. In this lecture, we examine the innovation of artists such as John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, and William Holman Hunt, also exploring the impact their thinking had in the 19th-century Arts & Craft Movement and the Gothic Revival. Meanwhile, in France, another group of artists looked to the here and now to drive change through their art. The Realists sought an innovative solution that would shed light on the social inequalities that defined modern life by doing something never done before: depicting working class life as it really was. In this way, Gustave Courbet, Jean François Millet, and others became artist-activists driving change through painting ordinary working people for the first time in the history of art.

1. Tues 16 September
The Pre-Raphaelites & The Birth of Modernism

2. Tues 23 September
Impressionism & Modern Life

3. Tues 30 September
Post-Impressionism

4. Tues 7 October
The Artist’s Inner World – Expressionism & Surrealism

5. Tues 14 October
The New Industrial Era – Futurism to Pop Art

6. Tues 21 October
The World Transformed – Cubism to Abstract Art