Pre-Raphaelites. Miranda - John William Waterhouse
Waterhouse was one of the late adopters of Pre-Raphaelitism. He died right before the end of World War I. After the War Pre-Raphaelitism wasn`t that popular any more.
Miranda is a character from Shakespeare's late play, "The Tempest." Waterhouse painted her in 1916, which was a dreadful year for both Waterhouse and Europe as a whole. World War One was at its height, and England suffered great losses in the senseless carnage.
At that time, Waterhouse had been battling cancer for a year. He would pass away a year after completing his work, in 1917. Despite all of this, somehow, the painting breathes with peace and hope. Waterhouse was trying to convey in that picture that there is always hope, even in the darkest moments of our lives.
Pre-Raphaelites
"God is dead," as we know from Nietzsche, refers to his assertion that God died somewhere in the nineteenth century in Europe. This famous thesis signifies, among other things, that Europeans had lost the sacred dimension of life. They no longer felt the sacred, even if they identified themselves as Christians and participated in church rituals. European culture had been overtaken by materialism and the scientific worldview.
Modern materialistic philosophy and the scientific worldview have proven to be incredibly efficient but also unbelievably boring and devoid of meaning. Many artists, both past and present, have rebelled against this state of affairs. One of the earliest and most prominent groups of rebels were the Pre-Raphaelites, who sought to reestablish the sacred dimension that they believed existed during the Middle Ages when every moment was infused with the sacred.
The Pre-Raphaelites derived their name from their belief that the corruption of European art began with Raphael. According to their perspective, Raphael's art had become unnatural and decadent. The Pre-Raphaelites looked to the artists of the early Renaissance as their role models.