Art and Astronomy in the work of the Pre-Raphaelites
Morning Lecture
17 January 2024
Night with Her Train of Stars by ER Hughes
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, Johnn Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Astronomy was one of many sources of inspiration for members of the PRB, since many of them were fascinated by the night sky and used astronomical symbolism to express their ideas. Key proponents included George Frederick Watts, Arthur Hughes and Edward Burne-Jones, whose works sometimes related to contemporary astronomical thinking and discoveries.
A female member, Evelyn De Morgan (1839-1917), also did a great deal to promote the depiction of astronomical features, particularly the moon. She was very involved in women’s education and the suffragette movement, and it surely cannot be coincidence that her husband’s father, Augustus de Morgan, was a well-known mathematician and astronomer.
Valerie Shrimplin is currently Senior Research Associate at Gresham College London, having previously been Registrar and Secretary of the College. She studied at the Universities of Bristol, Manchester and the Witwatersrand and has lectured extensively on Byzantine, Medieval and Renaissance art and architecture and published widely on the influence of astronomy and cosmology on art (including her PhD on the influence of Copernican heliocentricity on Michelangelo’s Sistine Last Judgment).
After her main career in education management she now works freelance, in order to pursue her writing and research (www.valerieshrimplin.com). She is Chair of the series of Conferences on the Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena (www.insap.org) and author of many publications.
Valerie Shrimplin