Brooke Shaden's Pre-Raphaelite Fashion Shoot

The Brotherhood just keeps popping up in unexpected fashion-y places lately! I was exploring the Flickr account of a favorite photographer, Brooke Shaden, and found a link to this blog post of hers about a recent shoot she did for Bullett Magazine. She and the editors agreed that the shoot should be inspired by "the famous Pre-Raphaelite painters". Actually, only the first artwork was painted by a Brotherhood member (Millais' Somnambulist, thank you Robert Parry for the identification), but the second and third are by Victorian Romantics (Waterhouse and Bouguereau) inspired by the Brotherhood. The inspirational artworks are fun to see, and the resulting images are gorgeous.

Apparently the images she shared are not the ones appearing in the magazine, so I'm curious to see what does appear, especially since she mentions renting a boat and filling it with flowers. Sounds gorgeous!

Rossetti on a Jet Plane

My husband Tom actually found this link and shared it with me. Too awesome.

Classical art inspirations for airline safety manuals, including Rossetti.

The best airline-safety-card artists know how to amplify these details without creating too much noise. They are, after all, artists. They work within and bend the conventions of their form by playing with allusions to earlier work. Take, for example, a current US Airways safety card that portrays the conventional water flotation scene. We see a beautiful woman, with lush red hair, floating effortlessly, gazing ahead in an attitude of easeful melancholy. The airline artist has recruited Dante Rossetti’s 1877 Mary Magdalene, with perhaps an ironic nod to Botticelli’s Venus, as the heroine of our worst-case scenario. Thus the “fallen woman” motif is reimagined in the most urgent terms: this airline Magdalene is a woman who has quite literally fallen. And this is where we find her, floating in limbo, clutching a lily-white life preserver to her breast (instead of a vase, as in the 1877 portrait). Like Rossetti’s romantic Pre-Raphaelite Magdalene, this woman’s lowly state serves only to magnify her elemental beauty. Here she is, Our Lady of the Plane Crash. “I will make you fishers of men,” says the Christ. “We will rescue you in any corner of the globe,” says a Pan Am safety card. The fallen woman will not remain cast away forever—and, if we follow her lead, the artist assures us, neither will we. It is a pretty vision of earthly salvation.

Vogue Cult of Beauty with Saoirse Ronan

The Cult of Beauty exhibit is coming to the United States...San Francisco to be specific...and in celebration, the December issue of Vogue on newsstands tomorrow did a photo spread of the even-more-stunning-every time I see her Saoirse Ronan, in Pre-Raphaelite style.

The caption on the above image reads "The actress, in the flame colored locks that recurred throughout Pre-Raphaelite paintings, makes a compelling case for reviving neoclassical style."

The above is my favorite image of the bunch, but supposedly it's a ten page spread, so I am eager to see if there is more we haven't seen yet.

The above image, clearly inspired by Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, has a caption that reads "In response to industrialization, mid-nineteenth century artists in Britain ushered in an era of handcrafts and bohemian beauty."


If you're reading this blog, I should hope you recognize the inspiration for the above image. Hint: It rhymes with Mophelia...


"Antithetical to the highly embellished and corseted mood of the period, many Pre-Raphaelites adopted gently flowing frocks evocative of the Middle Ages."

Stunning. Just stunning. Mark my words: Saorise Ronan is the younger generation's Cate Blanchett.

Recent Facebook Images

Facebook has become a wonderful place to share and discuss the Pre-Raphaelites, as I've already mentioned. Here are a few recent images shared there, none of which I had previously seen:

Ohmygosh...Raine found this Ned Burne-Jones cartoon of himself and Topsy in a sauna! Pre-Raphaelite softcore!

The front display window of Morris & Co:


Morris kids:


William Morris, a deathbed portrait:


Jane Morris' Kelmscott stationary, designed by Rossetti:


Edward Burne-Jones, along with George Howard and his wife:


A great Neddy cartoon, found by Raine, which inspired her "Ned's Angels" cartoon:

A startling and amazing portrait of Janey facing the camera, and with a hint of a Mona Lisa smile!


William Morris' horse drawn cart for his casket at his funeral. I had heard this described, but had never seen it:


And finally, a new wonderful cartoon from Raine, featuring my favorite member of the Sisterhood, Jane Morris!