Beauty as Protest 1845–1905

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Beata Beatrix  c.1864–70

Dante Gabriel Rossetti identified closely with the medieval poet Dante Alighieri. Rosetti saw his own despair at the death of his wife, the artist and poet Elizabeth Siddal, through Dante’s writings about the death of his beloved, Beatrice Portinari. Beata Beatrix pictures Siddal as Portinari in a dreamlike Florentine setting. Siddal’s death is re-imagined as a ‘spiritual transfiguration'. As an omen of death, a bird drops a white poppy between her open hands. In the background, Dante looks across at the figure of Love who holds the flame of life, and a sundial marks the time of her passing.

Gallery label, January 2025

Ford Madox Brown, Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet  1852–6

This picture illustrates the biblical story of Christ washing his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper. It has an unusually low viewpoint and compressed space. Critics objected to the picture’s coarseness – it originally depicted Jesus only semi-clad. This caused an outcry when it was first exhibited and it remained unsold for several years until Ford Madox Brown reworked the figure in robes. Brown was never invited to join the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood but he was a close associate of the group. Several members modelled for the disciples in this picture and the critic FG Stephens sat for Christ.

Gallery label, November 2016

Arthur Hughes, April Love  1855–6

Arthur Hughes’s painting shows a moment of tension between a young couple. The woman turns away as the man bows his head, pressing her hand between his. The sunlit lilacs are symbols of young love but the crushed rose in the shadows on the ground suggests that the relationship is troubled. By contrast, Hughes married the model Tryphena Ford the year this picture was painted. It brought Hughes success and was purchased by William Morris.

The brilliantly coloured dress was typical of the time. New industrial dyes, factory labour and cheaper textiles enabled men and woman to dress for show.

Gallery label, January 2025

Henry Alexander Bowler, The Doubt: ‘Can these Dry Bones Live?’  exhibited 1855

This young woman, leaning on the gravestone of a man called John Faithful, is contemplating religious doubt. In particular, the Christian belief that the dead will be resurrected on the Day of Judgement. Long-standing religious beliefs were being disrupted at the time this was painted. New scientific publications explored theories of evolution, challenging literal readings of the Bible. Her question appears to be answered by the growing chestnut tree and the stone at its base, carved with the word Resurgam’, which translates as ‘I shall rise again’. The blue butterfly on the skull symbolizes the human spirit.

Gallery label, August 2018

Joanna Mary Wells, Gretchen  1861

This picture alludes to a central scene in Faust, the tragic play published by German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the early 19th century. In the play, Gretchen, confused, seduced and pregnant by Faust, seeks solace in church. The sitter for the work was probably Wells’s nursery maid. Women artists had limited access to models at the time. Joanna Wells (née Boyce) had established a reputation during the 1850s as a painter of portraits, genre and landscape. She also wrote art reviews for the Saturday Review. Her career ended prematurely at the age of thirty. Wells herself was pregnant when she began this painting. She died shortly after the birth and the picture was left unfinished.

Gallery label, December 2020

William Holman Hunt, F.G. Stephens  1847

Frederic Stephens was one of the seven original members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He joined the group as a painter and went on to become a leading art critic. Stephens was admired for his appearance and frequently modelled for the circle. In their early years, the Brotherhood struggled to make a living and one member, Thomas Woolner, emigrated to Australia. This picture was part of a set of portraits that the group made of each other to send to their absent friend.

Gallery label, January 2025

Frederic George Stephens, Mother and Child  c.1854

Stephens painted this in the first year of the Crimean War (1853-6) and the major world event plays out in the setting of a Victorian nursery. The child pauses playing to reach towards his mother as she reacts to a letter which brings bad news from the conflict. Stephens encloses the figures in a curved frame like a traditional Madonna and Child and employs everyday objects, such as the military toys, as symbols. Stephen’s extremely detailed Pre-Raphaelite style was time-consuming and the picture was never finished.

Gallery label, August 2018

William Morris, La Belle Iseult  1858

Gallery label, August 2024

Ford Madox Brown, The Hayfield  1855–6

Brown painted this landscape directly from nature. The setting is the Tenterden estate at Hendon, north London, looking east at twilight. He finished the final details in his studio, adding a self-portrait in the lower left corner. The effect he sought to capture was the way in which the brown hay was made to appear almost pink by contrast with the dense green grass. After it was finished his dealer rejected it on the grounds that he had never seen hay of this colour. Brown later retouched the painting before selling it to his friend and fellow artist William Morris.

Gallery label, November 2016

William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience  1853

Hunt’s modern life painting represents a wealthy man visiting his mistress in an apartment which he has provided for her. The tune that he idly plays on the piano has reminded her of her earlier life and she rises from his lap towards the bright outside world (made visible to the viewer in the mirror). The claustrophobic space is filled with intricate clues, such as the bird trying to escape from a cat and the female figure enclosed in a glass dome, which echoes the shape of the painting.

Gallery label, November 2016

Thomas Woolner, Puck  1845–7

Puck is a mischievous invisible fairy in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Thomas Woolner has illustrated a scene here from an ‘Imaginary Biography’ of Puck. He alights on a mushroom to save a sleeping frog from a hungry snake. The sculpture captures the instant before a sudden movement – as Puck touches the frog with his foot it will jump away just before the snake attacks.Ideal or poetic subjects drawn from literature, mythology or history, were highly regarded by sculptors in the mid-nineteenth century.

Gallery label, July 2007

Joanna Mary Wells, Portrait of Sidney Wells  1859

In this portrait, the artist’s second child returns our gaze. Joanna Wells (née Boyce) was part of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. The portrait’s frontal format draws on early images of Jesus that Wells studied in Italy. Her meticulous technique brings the viewer physically and psychologically close to her subject.

In Victorian times, birth held high risks for mother and child. Sidney Wells died of a childhood illness and Joanna Wells did not survive the delivery of her third baby, two years later.

Gallery label, January 2025

Arthur Hughes, The Singer  1866

Martha Darley Mutrie, Wild Flowers at the Corner of a Cornfield  c.1855–60

Oil paint on canvas Like many artists of her time, Martha Mutrie benefitted from alternative art schools such as the Government School of Design, London (founded 1837) and Manchester School of Art (founded 1838). She trained in Manchester and had a successful career as a painter of still lifes. The critic John Ruskin admired her intricate Pre-Raphaelite technique when her works were exhibited at the Royal Academy. He suggested she move on from arranged compositions to ‘some banks of flowers in wild country, just as they grow’.

Gallery label, January 2025

Edward Lear, View of Reggio and the Straits of Messina  1852

Edward Lear is famous for his nonsense poems but he was also a botanical and zoological illustrator and travel artist. This view of the city of Reggio Calabria in Southern Italy, looking across the water to Sicily and Mount Etna, was a well-known tourist site. Etna is famous for its frequent volcanic eruptions but Lear chose to show it at peace. He made on-the-spot studies of details including the cactus and aloe plants in 1847, and created the finished painting in London, several years later.

Gallery label, January 2025

Thomas Seddon, Jerusalem and the Valley of Jehoshaphat from the Hill of Evil Counsel  1854–5

Seddon and his friend Holman Hunt journeyed to the Holy Land in 1854, to bring greater authenticity, spiritual and topographical, to their religious works. This view, painted south of Jerusalem, shows the Mount of Olives and the Garden of Gethsemane, the site of Christ’s anguish before the Crucifixion. The valley of Jehoshaphat was also believed to be where the Last Judgement would take place. Unlike John Martin’s apocalyptic visions, displayed nearby, Seddon represents the site in painstaking, sun-lit detail, paralleling the art critic John Ruskin’s remarks that ‘in following the steps of nature’, artists were ‘tracing the finger of God.’

Gallery label, March 2010

John William Inchbold, The Moorland (Dewar-stone, Dartmoor)  1854

John William Inchbold combines the Pre-Raphaelite's intense observation of detail with a mastery of light and atmosphere. He painted landscapes with literary associations. Here, he depicts the Dewerstone, a rocky area in Dartmoor National Park which features in an 1826 poem by Noel Thomas Carrington. The eerie cloud unfurling over the moor evokes the local legend of a ‘dewer’, or devil hunter, and his black dogs who were believed to drive travellers off the cliffs. The tale later inspired the Sherlock Holmes story The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Gallery label, January 2025

John Frederick Lewis, Study for ‘The Courtyard of the Coptic Patriarch’s House in Cairo’  c.1864

The Coptic Church is the ancient Orthodox Christian Church of Egypt. This study of the patriarch’s house was executed after Lewis’s return from Egypt in 1851, from the sketches he brought back. The picture highlights Lewis’s skill in depicting figures and setting with careful attention to light and shade, produced here by the top-lit courtyard. Lewis caused a sensation when he exhibited one of his Near Eastern scenes in London in 1850. John Ruskin admired his attention to detail, claiming that in truth-to-nature he ranked alongside the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Gallery label, November 2016

Sir John Everett Millais, Bt, Christ in the House of His Parents (‘The Carpenter’s Shop’)  1849–50

This picture was exhibited with words from the Old Testament, often seen as prefiguring Christ’s Crucifixion: ‘And one shall say unto him, What are these wounds in thine hands? Then shall he answer. Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.’ Millais based the setting on a real carpenter’s shop. Symbols of the Crucifixion figure prominently: the wood, the nails, the cut in Christ’s hand and the blood on his foot. Millais was viciously attacked in the press for showing the holy family as ‘ordinary’. Charles Dickens described Christ as ‘a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-haired boy in a night-gown.’

Gallery label, November 2016

Ford Madox Brown, ‘Take your Son, Sir’  ?1851–92

This enigmatic picture shows the artist’s second wife, Emma, and their new-born son, Arthur Gabriel. The pose is reminiscent of a traditional Madonna and child but the mother’s strained expression suggests that this is not a conventional celebration of marriage and motherhood. The domestic details of the room are indicative of a contemporary-life subject in which the woman holds out the baby to her husband reflected in the mirror. Ford Madox Brown began the composition in 1851 and, although he worked on it over a number of years, abandoned it following the death of Arthur in 1857.

Gallery label, November 2016

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Proserpine  1874

This painting captures the moment after the goddess Proserpine bites into a pomegranate. Imprisoned in the underworld, she is lit by a beam of sunlight from the world above. According to Roman legend, Hades, the God of the Underworld, stole and imprisoned Proserpine. Because she ate six pomegranate seeds while captive, he curses her to remain in the underworld for six months of every year. The model was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s friend Jane Morris, whom he painted repeatedly in his later years. He was working on an eighth version of Proserpine in the month of his death.

Gallery label, January 2025

William Holman Hunt, Our English Coasts, 1852 (‘Strayed Sheep’)  1852

The location shown in this painting is the Lovers’ Seat, an idyllic spot at Fairlight Glen near Hastings in Sussex. Hunt laboured here from mid-August to December 1852, enduring rain, wind and bitter cold to master his view. Despite the changes in weather, the painting seems a credible replication of particular illuminated moment. The colours used to convey light are daringly juxtaposed in order to intensify the clarity of every surface, a method that astounded audiences on both sides of the Channel.

Gallery label, November 2016

Arthur Hughes, The Eve of St Agnes  1856

This work was based on John Keats's poem The Eve of St Agnes (1820), inspired by the folk belief that a woman can see her future husband in a dream if she performs certain rites the day before the feast of St. Agnes, the patron saint of virgins. The frame is inscribed with the fourth verse of the poem, which sets the scene for the three episodes which Hughes depicts. First, Porphyro defies Madeleine’s family to approach the castle, where a banquet is in progress. He then awakens Madeline from her dreams. Finally, the lovers silently escape from the dark castle into the night.

Gallery label, March 2022

Ford Madox Brown, Carrying Corn  1854–5

This intensely coloured painting captures a harvest field just before sunset. Each landscape element is faithfully recorded in jewel-like colours. This is a nostalgic view of rural England, untouched by industrialisation and modern city life. Ford Madox Brown’s view is typical of idealists of the time who believed that an engagement with nature offered spiritual redemption from urban corruption. Brown and his family were facing financial hardship at the time this picture was painted. It was one of a number of ‘potboilers’, modest and straightforward landscapes he hoped would sell easily.

Gallery label, July 2007

Henry Wallis, The Room in Which Shakespeare Was Born  1853

Wallis launched his career exhibiting a sequence of paintings of interior scenes connected with the life of playwright William Shakespeare (1564-1616). This one shows Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon. It is based on a biography by Charles Knight written in 1842. It describes ‘the mean room, with its massive joists and plastered walls, firm with ribs of oak’. Wallis has painted the room in detail, including every nail securing the floorboards. He has also taken note of Knight’s passage describing how ‘hundreds amongst the hundreds of thousands by whom that name is honoured have inscribed their names on the walls of the room.’

Gallery label, June 2019

William Holman Hunt, The Haunted Manor  1849

Most of this landscape was painted in the open air in Wimbledon Park, in south-west London. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood believed strongly in painting directly from nature.The picture has a low view point, filled with close and fastidious studies of plants, rocks and water. The murky tones of the waterfall and tangled vegetation contrast strongly with the narrow, brightly-lit strip of landscape at the top of the picture. It is likely that this and the deserted manor house in the top right were added later, to give the scene a mysterious atmosphere.

Gallery label, July 2007

John Brett, Florence from Bellosguardo  1863

Brett became a student at the Royal Academy in 1853. Here he was influenced by the work of the Pre-Raphaelites and the writings of their most powerful supporter, John Ruskin. His earliest pictures in the Pre-Raphaelite style were much praised by Ruskin. During the winters of 1861-2 and 1862-3, he stayed in Florence where he painted this picture. It shows the city from the south-west looking towards Fiesole and the Appenines. The picture adheres strictly to the principle of 'truth to nature' and is a rare example of Pre-Raphaelite townscape.

Gallery label, August 2004

John William Inchbold, Gordale Scar, Yorkshire  exhibited 1876

Inchbold, who was born in Leeds, came under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites in the early 1850s. He established himself as one of the leading landscapists of the movement but by the end of the decade had adopted a broader, more atmospheric approach, as shown here. When it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy it was accompanied by lines from Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘Gordale’ of 1818: ‘... when the air/Glimmers with fading light .../Then, pensive Votary!, let thy feet repair/To Gordale-chasm, terrific as the lair/where the young lions couch; ...’.

Gallery label, November 2016

Arthur Hughes, Elaine with the Armour of Launcelot  1867

Arthur Hughes explores love experienced in solitude. The old-style clothing, jewellery and instruments associate these figures with medieval romances. Hughes was inspired by poet Alfred Lord Tennyson’s retelling of the story of Elaine, who fell in love with Lancelot, a Knight in the Court of King Arthur, when he visited her home for a tournament. Here she dreams over his armour. Sir Lancelot did not return Elaine’s love and, when he left, she died of a broken heart. In some versions of the legend, she was placed in a boat and her body drifted down Camelot, a subject most famously painted by John William Waterhouse (in Gallery 8).

Gallery label, January 2025

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, The Châtelaine  exhibited 1904

The Châtelaine (a French word for a noble woman who is mistress of a castle) is a polychrome, gilded statuette encrusted with semi-precious stones, set on a wooden base with turrets at its four corners and decorated with small Italianate landscapes on all four of its sides. Made of finely modelled plaster, the sculpture is richly patterned, painted and patinated. It represents a noble woman wearing a medieval ‘Balzo’ headdress and an opulent black and gold damask dress lined with red. Her estate is signified by a prominent set of heavy keys hanging from the green purse on her right side. Her face expresses sorrow and her hands are clasped in prayer or anguish. Despite the French title of the work, the figure’s style of dress appears to be Florentine, which is in accord with the Tuscany landscapes that are painted with gold leaf on the wooden base of the sculpture, in the manner of the so-called ‘predella’ scenes situated below sixteenth-century altarpieces. One of them represents a walled city, another a property with cypress trees; a third depicts a more generic landscape and the last one a shore approached by several ships.