In 1848, a group of frustrated art students met in secret in a family home on Gower Street in London and formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Fed up with the Royal Academy and the lingering influence of Joshua Reynolds, whom they nicknamed Sir Sloshua, they rejected idealized compositions and artificial studio lighting in favor of the sharp detail, intense color, and crowded compositions of the early Italian Renaissance. This episode traces the full life of the movement, from its punk-like rebellion against academic formula to the scandal, betrayal, and fracturing that ended the formal group within about five years.

We look at how William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais engineered their jewel-like colors by painting thin glazes into a wet white ground, why Charles Dickens attacked Millais’s carpenter-shop Holy Family so viciously that Queen Victoria asked to see the painting, and how critic John Ruskin rescued the group only to lose his wife Effie Gray to Millais. From there the story splits into Hunt’s realist path to Egypt and Palestine, Rossetti’s romantic femme fatales and his affair with Jane Morris, and William Morris’s arts and crafts firm that carried the philosophy into wallpaper, textiles, and furniture.

• Why the Brotherhood despised the Royal Academy, bitumen-darkened canvases, and the smog-stained art of 1840s London
• The wet white ground technique that made early Pre-Raphaelite paintings glow like stained glass
• The 1850 scandal over Millais’s Holy Family, Dickens’s scathing review, and James Collinson’s crisis of faith
• John Ruskin’s defense, the Scottish Highlands trip, and the annulment that let Effie Gray marry Millais
• How the movement’s legacy reached the arts and crafts movement, European symbolism, J.R.R. Tolkien, and major Tate exhibitions