The Pre Raphaelites were shaped as much by poetry as paint. A new exhibition wants to prove it

The Pre Raphaelites are often remembered for their luminous paintings, medieval romance and meticulous attention to detail. Their richly coloured canvases have become among the defining images of Victorian Britain, shaping generations of artists and collectors alike. Less widely recognised is the extent to which literature, rather than painting, lay at the heart of the movement itself.

A major exhibition opening at Newcastle's Laing Art Gallery this autumn sets out to challenge that perception by placing poetry, rather than paint, at the centre of the Pre Raphaelite story. Pre Raphaelites: Art and Poetry brings together more than 100 paintings, drawings, manuscripts and decorative works to explore how Britain's most influential artistic movement drew inspiration from writers as readily as Renaissance masters.

The exhibition argues that the Brotherhood's fascination with literature was not incidental but fundamental to its identity. Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, John Keats and Alfred, Lord Tennyson all provided subjects that artists returned to repeatedly, transforming verse into images that have since become among the best known works of Victorian art. Poetry offered the movement both narrative and symbolism, allowing artists to explore themes of love, faith, heroism and tragedy through an intensely visual language.

Few figures embodied that relationship more completely than Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Painter, poet and founding member of the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood, Rossetti often worked across both disciplines simultaneously, producing poems to accompany paintings and paintings inspired by poems. His ambition was to create what he described as a "double work of art", where image and text enriched one another rather than existing independently.

That idea extends throughout the exhibition, which includes celebrated works such as Beata Beatrix, Burne Jones's Laus Veneris and William Holman Hunt's Isabella and the Pot of Basil, displayed alongside the literary sources that informed them. Rather than presenting paintings as isolated masterpieces, the exhibition invites visitors to understand them as part of a wider Victorian conversation between artists, poets and designers.

It also broadens the traditional narrative of the movement itself. Alongside familiar names such as Hunt, Millais, Burne Jones and William Morris, considerable attention is given to women whose contributions have often received less recognition. Elizabeth Siddall, remembered by many primarily as Rossetti's muse, emerges as an accomplished artist and poet in her own right, while photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and artist Kate Bunce demonstrate the breadth of creative talent associated with the movement.

The exhibition reflects a wider reassessment of Victorian art. For much of the 20th century, the Pre Raphaelites were dismissed by critics as sentimental or excessively decorative. In recent decades, however, both scholars and the public have rediscovered their technical brilliance and intellectual ambition, recognising that their influence extended far beyond painting into architecture, literature, design and the Arts and Crafts movement.

That renewed interest has also encouraged museums to reconsider the movement through fresh perspectives. By concentrating on poetry rather than chronology, the Laing exhibition reveals connections that conventional art historical surveys can sometimes overlook. Decorative objects, stained glass, tapestries and illustrated books sit comfortably alongside paintings, illustrating how Victorian artists moved freely between disciplines in pursuit of a shared artistic vision.

The result is a reminder that the Pre Raphaelites never regarded painting as an isolated pursuit. Their ambition was to unite the visual and literary arts into something richer than either could achieve alone. More than 175 years after the Brotherhood first gathered in London, that vision continues to resonate, offering a compelling account of how Britain's greatest artistic movements are often born not from a single discipline but from conversations between many.

For visitors, the exhibition promises more than a survey of familiar masterpieces. It offers an opportunity to rediscover the literary imagination that lay behind them, and in doing so reveals that some of the finest paintings of Victorian Britain began not with a brushstroke, but with a line of verse.