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| William Holman Hunt Our English Coasts, 1852 (Strayed Sheep) 1852 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"In Modern Painters (1847) the writer and critic John Ruskin exhorted young English artists to 'go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instructions; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing; believing all things to be right and good, and rejoicing always in the truth.' Following Ruskin's dictum that art in its truthfulness can teach a moral lesson, William Holman Hunt created his greatest and most Pre-Raphaelite landscape. The location for the picture was the Lover's Seat, a well-known beauty spot perched on the cliffs overlooking Covehurst Bay, near Hastings. Hunt exhibited the picture at the Royal Academy in 1853 with the title Our English Coasts. The original frame bore the inscription Lost Sheep, and when Hunt sent the painting to the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855 he changed the title to Strayed Sheep, thus underlining the picture's religious symbolism. However, critics of the time were struck less by the picture's symbolism than by the treatment of light. Ruskin wrote in 1883 that 'it showed to us, for the first time in the history of art, the absolutely faithful balances of colour and shade by which actual sunshine might be transposed into a key in which the harmonies possible with material pigment should yet produce the same impressions upon the mind which were caused by the light itself.'
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| William Holman Hunt Portrait of F.G. Stephens 1847 oil on panel Tate Gallery |
"F.G. Stephens was a friend to the artists Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown from their studies at the Royal Academy Schools. He modelled for many of their paintings and joined the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. This portrait was made before the formation of the brotherhood and it is much more loosely painted than strictly Pre-Raphaelite works. Stephens later gave up painting to work as a critic and writer. His reviews helped to advance the cause of contemporary British art and were particularly favourable to his former Pre-Raphaelite colleagues."
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| John Everett Millais Mrs James Wyatt Jr and her daughter Sarah ca. 1850 oil on panel Tate Gallery |
"On the wall behind the sitters are, from left to right, prints after Raphael's Madonna della Sedia, Leonardo's Last Supper and Raphael's Alba Madonna. Millais disdained Raphael at this time, and used this portrait to set out his position as a Pre-Raphaelite. His stark, realistic portrayal of this mother and child contrasts sharply with Raphael's soft, idealised depiction of the subject."
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| John Everett Millais Charles I and his Son in the Studio of Van Dyck 1849 oil on panel Tate Gallery |
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| Henry Wallis The Room in which Shakespeare was Born 1853 oil on panel Tate Gallery |
"Wallis launched his career exhibiting a sequence of paintings of interior scenes connected with the life of William Shakespeare. This one showing the playwright's supposed birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon is based on a passage from a contemporary biography (1842) by Charles Knight, describing 'the mean room, with its massive joists and plastered walls, firm with ribs of oak.' Wallis has even 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.'
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| Frederic Leighton Study for The Discovery of Juliet, Apparently Lifeless ca. 1858 oil on panel Tate Gallery |
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| Charles Robert Leslie Sketch for The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope ca. 1854 oil on panel Tate Gallery |
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| George Elgar Hicks Woman's Mission - Companion of Manhood 1863- oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"These two paintings [above and below] make up two scenes in a triptych called Woman's Mission, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1863. The missing section is Guide to Childhood. As a group, the pictures represent the same woman in her role as mother, wife, and attentive daughter, or, as one critic of the time put it, 'woman in three phases of her duties as ministering angel.'
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| George Elgar Hicks Woman's Mission - Comfort of Old Age 1862 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Dante Gabriel Rossetti Lucrezia Borgia 1860-61 watercolour on paper Tate Gallery |
"Rossetti began work on this subject in 1860 at a time when he was especially interested in the history of the infamous Borgia family. In this watercolour Lucrezia Borgia washes her hands after poisoning her husband Duke Alfonso Bisceglie. She is aided in the crime by her father, Pope Alexander VI. The reflection in the mirror shows him assisting the Duke to walk, thereby ensuring that the poison thoroughly infects the entire body."
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| Dante Gabriel Rossetti Joan of Arc 1864 watercolor on board Tate Gallery |
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| John Frederick Lewis The Siesta 1876 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"The artist Edward Lear said of Lewis's Near Eastern subjects, 'There has never been, and there never will be, any works depicting Oriental life more truly beautiful and excellent.' A trip to Spain in the early 1830s kindled Lewis's interest in 'exotic' lands, and in 1841 he settled in Cairo for ten years. On his return to England he earned a reputation for images of the Near East painted in watercolor or oils. Characterised by their bright colours and attention to detail, they often show languid figures, especially women in harems, who are often given western features."
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| John Frederick Lewis Edfu, Upper Egypt 1860 oil on panel Tate Gallery |
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| Alphonse Legros Rehearsing the Service ca. 1870 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"The French realist painter Legros moved to London in 1863, and from then exhibited both at the Royal Academy and the Paris Salon. In the late 1860s he came to admire Ingres and the Italian Old Masters, and emphasised outline and local colour in his paintings. He favoured church subjects, treating them as motifs of daily life. The priest at the right was painted from the famous Italian model Alessandro di Marco, who also posed for Burne-Jones, Leighton and others."
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| Alphonse Legros Le Repas des Pauvres 1877 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
– quoted passages based on notes by curators at the Tate in London