Reading the Pictures: Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Poetry Opens at the Laing

There is a particular pleasure in standing in front of a Pre-Raphaelite painting and realising that it is, in effect, a page torn from a book. The knights, the drowned maidens, the lovers in walled gardens: almost none of them were invented from scratch. They came from Dante, Chaucer, Keats, Tennyson and Christina Rossetti, and the painters expected their audiences to know the lines. Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Poetry, which opened at Newcastle’s Laing Art Gallery on Saturday 17 October and runs until 13 February 2027, is built on that simple but surprisingly under-explored idea. The gallery bills it as the first exhibition to examine that connection at this scale.

A Brotherhood of Readers

We tend to file the Pre-Raphaelites under painting, because that is what fills the walls at Tate Britain and Birmingham. Yet the Brotherhood, founded in 1848, was a literary enterprise almost from the start. Its members published their own magazine, The Germ, subtitled Art and Poetry, in which they printed verse and prose alongside work by close associates such as Christina Rossetti. A copy opens the show, and it sets the tone well. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a poet as much as a painter, William Morris a poet as much as a designer, and the line between the two activities was never one they took very seriously.

The opening room also gathers pictures from the movement’s beginnings. Ford Madox Brown’s The Seeds and Fruits of English Poetry, lent by the Ashmolean, is a sort of family tree of English verse. Henry Wallis’s Death of Chatterton, from Birmingham, gives us the Victorian romance of the starving young poet in its most famous form, while Millais’s The Woodman’s Daughter, from the Guildhall Art Gallery, shows the Brotherhood responding to poetry of its own day.

Three Ways Through the Library

The exhibition is arranged in three themes, which the curators call Poems Past, Romantic Rhymes and Victorian Visions. The first deals with older literature, from the classical world to Shakespeare, and contains a rich cluster of works connected to Dante, the poet whose name Rossetti carried and whose writing obsessed him. Here you will find Birmingham’s version of Beata Beatrix, Rossetti’s haunted memorial image of his wife Elizabeth Siddal in the guise of Dante’s Beatrice, together with Tate’s Dantis Amor and a Julia Margaret Cameron photograph that offers a quite different reading of the Dantesque. The same section shows how Chaucer fed into stained glass, tiles, wallpaper and, finally, the Kelmscott Chaucer, which many people regard as one of the most beautiful books ever printed.

Romantic Rhymes turns to Keats and Burns. This is where the Laing’s own Isabella and the Pot of Basil by William Holman Hunt, painted in Florence in 1867, is reunited with Hunt’s delicate preparatory studies from the Ashmolean. If you have only ever seen the painting on its own, the drawings make a strong case for slowing down and looking at how a picture is built.

Victorian Visions is the largest section, and rightly so. Tennyson inspired more Pre-Raphaelite art than any other writer, and the show traces that influence from the famous Moxon edition of his poems, illustrated by Hunt, Millais and Rossetti, to Siddal’s pen and ink drawings and Cameron’s dreamlike photographs. Burne-Jones’s Laus Veneris, the Laing’s other great Pre-Raphaelite treasure, appears beside its preparatory studies, a medieval manuscript that may have helped inspire it, and the Morris & Co. tapestry The Forest, borrowed from the V&A, which has a poem by Morris woven into its design.

Beyond the Brotherhood

One of the most welcome aspects of the exhibition is its attention to women. Siddal is presented as an artist in her own right rather than simply as Rossetti’s model, and there is room for Kate Bunce, whose The Keepsake interprets one of Rossetti’s poems, and for designers such as Phoebe Anna Traquair and Fanny Bunn, who rarely receive this kind of exposure. The mix of embroidery, metalwork, books and photography alongside paintings is a useful reminder that the movement was never confined to the easel.

There is a local thread too. Rossetti’s watercolour Paolo and Francesca, lent by The Higgins Bedford, was commissioned by James Leathart, a Newcastle lead manufacturer and one of the most important Pre-Raphaelite patrons, and William Bell Scott, a Newcastle-based friend of the circle, is represented through works inspired by The Kingis Quair. The North East has a deeper claim on this movement than most visitors realise.

Why It Matters Beyond Newcastle

The loans come from more than a dozen collections, including Tate, the V&A, Birmingham, the Fitzwilliam, the Bodleian and the National Galleries of Scotland, and they are supported by the Weston Loan Programme with Art Fund, a scheme designed to help regional and local authority museums borrow from national collections. That matters. Ambitious, scholarly exhibitions of this kind are too often assumed to belong in London, and a show like this makes the case that they need not.

Admission is charged, and the show deserves a proper afternoon. Read the poems where they are offered, and let the pictures do what their makers intended: send you back to the books.