The Pre-Raphaelite Dream: Paintings and Drawings from the Tate Collection has been curated by Robert Upstone, Curator of British Art 1860-1960 at Tate. The exhibition consists of 71 works, including oil paintings, watercolours, drawings and prints.
Tate has one of the world's outstanding collections of Pre-Raphaelite pictures. The Pre-Raphaelite Dream: Paintings and Drawings from the Tate Collection is intended to showcase the breadth and quality of that material, while illustrating all the issues surrounding Pre-Raphaelitism.
Familiar, iconic pictures such as Rossetti's Proserpine and Monna Vanna, Holman Hunt's The Awakening Conscience and Millais's Mariana will be brought together with undeservedly lesser-known paintings by the major artists, such as Holman Hunt's wonderful, jewel-like early portrait of Frederic Stephens or his haunting and ambiguous canvas entitled The Ship.
The Pre-Raphaelite Dream highlights the outstanding strength of Pre-Raphaelite drawings in the Tate collection, with a particularly strong group of major Rossetti and Burne-Jones works on paper, which are only rarely seen at the Tate.
The Pre-Raphaelite Dream also demonstrates the rich flowering of Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics outside the original Brotherhood, and places the movement in its fuller historical and social context. It includes works by artists who were friends or followers of the Brotherhood members and who absorbed and developed their aesthetic tendencies - for instance, some outstanding pictures by artists such as Simeon Solomon, Spencer Stanhope, Arthur Hughes and Robert Martineau. A small group of prints is included in order to show how the Pre-Raphaelites' ideas were disseminated.