The aims of the group were threefold: 

• To paint serious and significant subjects
• To paint them directly from nature of life, as realistically as possible
• To paint with the full colour and luminosity of the light of the day

William Michael Rossetti (Dante Gabriel Rossetti's brother) set out their aims:

"To have genuine ideas to express;

To study nature attentively, so as to know how to express them;

To sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art to the exclusion of what is conventional, self-parading and learned by rote;

And most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues!"