A secret brotherhood of seven members
In September 1848, seven young London artists — among them Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, all barely twenty at the time — found the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a secret movement whose very name is a manifesto: they reject academic painting as taught since Raphael, which they consider artificial and mannered, in favour of returning to the minute precision and vivid colour of art before the Italian Renaissance.
This room covers sixty years of that aesthetic, from the initial revolt of 1848 to its later extensions toward 1905 — the time it took the movement to move from scandal to lasting influence over an entire generation of British painters.
1. An Annunciation with no halo and no triumphant lily
Ecce Ancilla Domini! ("Behold the handmaid of the Lord"), painted by Rossetti in 1849-1850, deliberately breaks with centuries of pictorial convention: Mary is not standing serenely before the angel, she is seated on her bed, drawn back, visibly frightened by Gabriel's appearance. Her long white nightgown suggests a young bride rather than a sacred figure, and the whole composition — walls, linen, clothing — is painted in an almost monochrome range of whites, to stress the purity of the moment rather than its glory.
The painting scandalises on its showing in 1850: the press finds it too raw, almost profane in its treatment of a central religious subject. This is a typical reaction to how the Brotherhood was received at the time — judged both too archaic in its references and too realistic in its treatment of bodies.
2. Beata Beatrix: painting the grief of his own wife
Elizabeth Siddal, model and then wife of Rossetti, dies in 1862 of a laudanum overdose, in circumstances her circle suspects to have been suicide. Rossetti paints Beata Beatrix in the years that follow, drawing on the many drawings he had made of her while she was alive: the painting officially represents Beatrice, Dante's beloved in the Vita Nuova, at the moment of her own death — but everyone at the time understood it also as a posthumous portrait of Siddal herself.
Look for the symbols scattered through the composition: a red dove, messenger of love, drops a white poppy into Beatrice's hands — the flower from which laudanum is extracted, the very substance that killed Siddal. The painting works simultaneously as literary illustration and personal elegy, the two readings overlapping without ever fully separating.
How much time
Spend time in front of the two Rossettis before moving through the rest of the room, which gathers other figures of the movement and its legacy into the turn of the twentieth century.
- Ecce Ancilla Domini! — 8 minutes.
- Beata Beatrix — 8 minutes.
- The rest of the room — 15 minutes.
Sources and verification
Checked against Tate's collection pages (tate.org.uk) and cross-checked with Wikipedia EN/FR.
- Tate — Ecce Ancilla Domini! (The Annunciation), Dante Gabriel Rossetti
- Wikipedia EN — Ecce Ancilla Domini!
- Wikipedia EN — Beata Beatrix
- Tate — The Rossettis, exhibition
- Apollo Magazine — The Rossettis at Tate Britain
Displays and room openings can change. Check the Tate Britain website on the day of your visit before following a route.
Listen to the commentary in the gallery
This route gives you a thread to follow. In front of an artwork, CulturAll adds the audio commentary: photograph the work or its label, listen, then ask your questions.
