Pre-Raphaelite Treasures: Drawings and Watercolours from the Ashmolean Museum

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Pre-Raphaelite Treasures: Drawings and Watercolours from the Ashmolean Museum
8 March - 12 June
Admission £14.95 with Gift Aid - ticket includes entry to Historic Galleries
Friends Free | Under 18s Free

This spring, we have been given the rare opportunity to display highlights from the Ashmolean Museum's internationally-renowned collection of Pre-Raphaelite drawings and watercolours. Artists of the Pre-Raphaelite movement came from a wide range of artistic backgrounds and created drawings in a variety of styles and techniques over the course of their careers. However, these treasures are rarely publicly exhibited owing to their delicacy and sensitivity to light exposure.

This exhibition will showcase how artists including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and Elizabeth Siddal experimented with different drawing materials, sometimes making careful studies from life and in other instances expressing their fertile imagination on paper. They produced rough sketches and elaborate finished drawings in pencil and pen, chalks and pastel, and even gold paint. This exhibition also offers the chance to bring select works on paper by the Pre-Raphaelites' contemporary G F Watts out from the Watts Gallery archive, and explore the different ways in which these prominent Victorian artists approached their work and subject matter, from landscape and portraiture to scenes from history and literature.