This piece received third place in the nonfiction category of the 2025 Wallace Prize. When I was nineteen it was my simple pleasure to walk every morning from class on York Street to my small room ...

In 1854, at a time when divorce was considered taboo, Effie Gray went to court to annul her marriage to art critic John Ruskin. Gray cited the non-consummation of their wedding vows as justification ...

Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais’ painting The Blind Girl (1854–56) shows two girls sitting in a bright green meadow with a double rainbow in the background. While the younger girl stares ...

Truth & Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelites and the Old Masters is an escape. In the mausoleum-like lower galleries at the Legion of Honor, there are no windows to remind you of the outside world. There’s ...

Winifred Sandys, "White Mayde of Avenel" (after 1902), watercolor on vellum, 8 × 6 inches. Delaware Art Museum, Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial, 1935 (all images courtesy Delaware Art Museum) ...

The top-selling image at the museum bookstore of London’s Tate Britain is of a young woman floating on her back in a quiet river. Heavy-lidded eyes stare emptily upwards, lips are parted in confusion, ...

Edward Burne-Jones Tate Britain, London. Until 24 February 2019. Extraordinary advances in science, technology and industry shaped the Victorian age; alongside that grew a new experimentalism in ...

THE PRE-RAPHAELITE TRAGEDY — William Gaunt—Harcourt, Brace ($3). When Britain trembled over one of its periodic French invasion scares in 1859, the home guards were somewhat puzzled by the enlistment ...

The English don’t really like art,” a celebrated (English) abstract sculptor told me, some time ago. “We like literature and nature—gardens and landscape. That’s why we admire all those artists who go ...

A vision realized : pre-Raphaelitism in the Bancroft collection / Stephen Wildman -- Samuel Bancroft : collector of the pre-Raphaelites / Margaretta S. Frederick -- Charles Fairfax Murray : keeper of ...