Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Poetry

Admission charges apply

This autumn and winter, visitors will have the chance to see the first large-scale exhibition to explore the connections between Pre-Raphaelite art and poetry.

The Pre-Raphaelite circle included both artists and writers. The leading visual artists of Pre-Raphaelitism’s first phase, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, bonded over their admiration of the Romantic poet John Keats. Along with medieval and early Renaissance art and a commitment to closely observing nature, literature was their key inspiration. Some of the poems they most admired told stories of love and peril in the medieval world. The artists translated these stories from word to image in a modern way, covering their canvases with elaborate detail.

Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Poetry features over 100 masterpiece paintings, drawings, and objects, some of which have never been displayed in Newcastle before. The artists on display include Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti, as well as Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. The exhibition will be further enhanced by an emphasis on women artists including Elizabeth Siddall, Kate Bunce, and Julia Margaret Cameron. The exhibition reveals how the artists were inspired by poets including Dante Aligheri, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Keats, and Alfred Tennyson, and by writers from the Pre-Raphaelites' own circle, such as Christina Rossetti. There are also examples of their art inspiring new poetry.

A range of fine and decorative art is included in the exhibition, providing visitors with the chance to see exquisite embroidery, metalwork, stained glass, tapestry, illuminated manuscripts, and books, as well as paintings and works on paper. Together, the stunning array of loans reveal the creative exchange between art and poetry seen during one of the most exciting periods of British art and literature.

Visitors to the exhibition will also be able to see two internationally important paintings from the Laing’s collections, Hunt’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil and Burne-Jones’ Laus Veneris, in the context of Pre-Raphaelitism as a literary, as well as an artistic, movement. They will be displayed alongside other works with the same poetic inspiration and alongside preparatory works for the larger masterpieces.

Key loans have travelled to the Laing Art Gallery from public and private collections across the UK. Lenders include Tate, V&A, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Guildhall Art Gallery, William Morris Gallery, Ashmolean Museum, Fitzwilliam Museum, The Higgins Bedford, the Society of Antiquaries of London, Tullie House, The Bodleian, and many more.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue published by the Laing Art Gallery, supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. 

This exhibition was made possible with a grant from the Weston Loan Programme with Art Fund and is also co-supported by the Cosman Keller Trust and the Golsoncott Foundation.

Beata Beatrix by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1862). Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.