Works of Feeling: Pre-Raphaelite Book Illustration
2 January - 27 April 2018
RA Library Print Room
Tuesday – Friday
10am – 1pm and 2 – 5pm
Complimentary entry with a valid Royal Academy exhibition ticket or £3 General Admission ticket. Friends of the RA and under 16s go free.
Friends of the RA go free
A focused display of Victorian wood-engravings in the Royal Academy Print Room, featuring Pre-Raphaelite artists including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt.
The Pre-Raphaelites are admired for the groundbreaking combination of vibrant colour, naturalism and emotional charge contained in their paintings. What is far less known is that early in their careers they were accomplished book illustrators.
They captured and interpreted the rich visual imagery of poetry by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in black-and-white wood-engraving and produced works of astounding, sometimes shocking, originality. Moxon’s Tennyson volume published in 1857 showcased their new approach to illustration and favourite subjects such as the Lady of Shalott, St. Cecilia and Mariana enthralled and baffled the public, including Tennyson himself. The burgeoning Victorian magazine industry provided a lucrative market for this work. Graphic works by Pre-Raphaelite artists and their acolytes Sir Edward Burne-Jones ARA and Simeon Solomon, engraved by expert Fleet Street craftsmen, appeared regularly in religious journals Good Words, Once a Week and Leisure Hour during the 1860s.
The Royal Academy holds a collection of these works in print and book form. We are delighted to show a small selection in the Library Print Room, giving further insight into the literary and emotional sources of Pre-Raphaelite creativity. The display will also contain examples of related mid-Victorian illustration by Frederick Sandys, Lord Leighton PRA and Sir Edward Poynter PRA.
Tuesday – Friday
10am – 1pm and 2 – 5pm
Complimentary entry with a valid Royal Academy exhibition ticket or £3 General Admission ticket. Friends of the RA and under 16s go free.
Friends of the RA go free
Gallery
The Summer Snow, 1863
The Parable of the Sower, 1863
Illustration for Good Words
The Death of King Warwulf, 1862
Illustration for Once a Week
The Weeping Queens, 1857
Illustration to The Palace of Art
Read more
How to read it: Edward Burne-Jones's The Summer Snow
7 December 2017
