ABSTRACT
The Pre-Raphaelite 'alien' vision of art and of beauty was at the core of public suspicion, and indeed their reordering of visual priorities, along with their fixation with the concept of sight in theme and process, are intertwined developments in the history of Pre-Raphaelite painting, portraiture and critical reception. Beyond literal portrait taking, there was a preponderance of latent or accidental portraiture, an integral by-product of Pre-Raphaelitism in which the artists, their families and their friends posed for the faces of personages in their compositions. From the outset, portraiture was an integral aspect of Pre-Raphaelitism, although it had, so to speak, many faces during its long period of influence from the late 1840s to the turn of the century and beyond. As is well known, the original members of the Brotherhood deliberately tried to overturn prevailing artistic conventions, in the process assailing many tenets of academic and past art, including those regarding portraiture.
