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 Welcome to the Victorian Summer Project prepared by the MA Victorian Studies at Birkbeck.  This pedagogic initiative draws on the Pre-Raphaelites Online Network, which brings Birkbeck, Birmingham, Exeter and Purdue together with Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Delaware Art Gallery, The Watts Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art, and the COVE Collective.

We are going to curate "virtual exhibitions" about the Pre-Raphaelites. Working in small groups, identify an exhibition theme and select eight objects through which to explore that theme. Each member of the group will be tasked with researching two objects. As a group, you will need to think about how you will introduce the collection and exhibition theme. Each group will produce a virtual exhibition on the COVE Editions platform.

Imagine you are a curator from one of the institutions participating in the Pre-Raphaelites Online (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Delaware Art Gallery, The Watts Gallery, Yale Center for British Art). For your exhibition you want to complement one of the Pre-Raphaelite objects in your collection with objects loaned from elsewhere. 

Now imagine that you work at one of the institutions participating in the Pre-Raphaelites Online (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Delaware Art Gallery, The Watts Gallery, Yale Center for British Art). Look through individual exhibition ideas that individual curators have pitched. Pick three, drawing on elements from more than one presentation, to complement one (or more) object(s) in your collection. Select or propose a title, and draft a rationale for your choice: it can be as short or as long as you want, but check out online exhibition blurbs for inspiration. 

The next step is to redistribute the curatorial team into groups each working on one of those three ideas as a team to develop it into an exhibition. You will be working to produce a title, an introductory section including an image and a text of up to 150 words introducing the collection and exhibition theme; add 8 further sections featuring an image and caption text of up to 100 words for each object.  

Timelines, Galleries, and Maps

The Majesty of Nature; Objects and Settings in Pre-Raphaelite works. | Gallery Exhibit

 Nature was central to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's rebellion against approaches to art featured at the Royal Academy in the 1840s, in which the background landscapes were secondary to classicly posed models. The Pre-Raphaelites yearned for the return to a bucolic lifestyle, an imagined idyll of pastoral living, which offered an alternative to the changes brought about by the… more

Posted by Anna Ironside on

Rossetti and his Stunners - Proserpine: A Series | Gallery Exhibit

Much like the myth of Proserpine the beautiful goddess abducted by Hades, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s adoration of the women that modelled and socialised within Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood circles led to an obsession akin to the pull of Cupid’s bow upon the King of the Underworld. “The Stunners” epitomised Rossetti’s, and his fellow Pre-Raphaelites’, proclivity for immortalising unconventional… more

Posted by Niamh Jarvis on

Literary Pre-Raphaelites | Gallery Exhibit

This exhibition features Pre Raphaelite works adapted from literature. The Pre Raphaelites borrowed immensely from William Shakespeare, John Keats and from their own Victorian contemporaries such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson to create an aesthetic reminiscent of medieval-style but, at the same time, wholly new. The project of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was to… more

Posted by Lucy Brewer on

Pre-Raphaelite Timeline | Timeline

Use the timeline to provide a chronology that places your exhibits within a historical context.

Posted by Luisa Calè on

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