Out and About with the Pre-Rafaelites

Each week as part of 'Out and About' club, students on the GCSE Programme find out more about Oxford's past and present. Recently they were finding out about The Pre-Rafaelite Brotherhood In Oxford – and this is what they wrote about the experience…

First of all we watched a short documentary film about the Pre-Rafaelite Brotherhood. Then we saw a clip from the BBC television series, Desperate Romantics, which dramatised the lives of three of the founding members of the group, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and Edward Burne-Jones. We learned about the major themes in Pre-Rafaelite painting, life, love, death and nature and the importance of 'real issues' to their art.

Next we went 'Out and About' to Oxford University's world famous Union Society building. In the Old Library at the Union Society there are wall murals depicting scenes from the legend of King Arthur and the knights of the round table. These were painted by Rossetti, Burne-Jones and William Morris (another pre-Rafaelite) between 1857 and 1859.


After our trip to the Union Society, some of us continued on to the Ashmolean Museum where we went to a special exhibition called The Pre-Rafaelites and Italy. The exhibition continues until the 5th of December and is really interesting.

— Report by Helen Zhang, Bonnie Shi, Kristen Li, Kate Markman and Jeremy Feng