The Pre-Raphaelites: One of the Most Important Artistic Movements of the 19th Century

Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery has one of the Finest Pre-Raphaelite Collections in the world…

I last visited the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery a year before Covid and the lockdown, the interior housekeeping was poor, with the building, inside and out, in dire need of repair and decorating. I know the city council were strapped for cash at the time but now they cannot allow this beautiful old building, and its galleries, to disintegrate any further. It certainly didn’t look as good as the photograph below.

Anyway, I’d come to see the Pre-Raphaelites, and once I’d made my way past a couple of closed galleries, I found what I was looking for, and all my disappointment about the state of the building fell away. I was amongst friends.

Birmingham has one of the finest collections of Pre-Raphaelite art in the world, most especially the work of William Holman Hunt, Ford Madox Brown (who was never an official member of the PRB) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood — which was made up of seven original members, most notably Hunt, Rossetti…