The current exhibition Dreams and Stories: Modern Pre-Raphaelite Visionaries at the Watts Gallery invites the viewer to look at a range of artists creating ‘Pre-Raphaelite art’ well into the twentieth century.

The exhibition see maidens, chivalric knights, guardian angels, ghosts and fairies co-existing alongside cities, electricity, sewing machines, aeroplanes. Capturing the fin de siècle mood of both excitement and anxiety, the exhibition highlights a persistent yearning for the spiritual evident in many artworks.

Types of Pre Raphaelite woman also persisted, mediated and interacting with modern life. Paintings by Evelyn Pickering De Morgan in the show highlight her distinctive, visionary approach to colour, figures and Pre-Raphaelite style subjects. Her work provides a significant, original response to the Symbolist movement and the contemporary concern for expressing the unknowable and spiritual energies.

The exhibition also gives a rare and exciting opportunity to view a collection of works by Frederick Cayley Robinson, who is at the heart of the display. Many of his works, of forgotten British Symbolism and proto-Surrealism, have not been display for decades. The display highlights how older visual languages and spiritual yearnings are carried over in intriguing ways into the modern age of film, X-rays and the Titanic. Despite their neglect for much of the twentieth century, the artists are re-positioned firmly in the centre of their modern world engaging with its anxieties, questioning, hopes and fears.

Dr Alice Eden. Biography

Alice Eden is an historian of art and culture, writer and Research Curator. She is co-curator of Dreams and Stories: Modern Pre-Raphaelite Visionaries: British Art 1880-1930, an exhibition of ‘Forgotten’ ‘late Pre-Raphaelite’ artists and British Symbolists, 1880-1930 at the Watts Gallery, 2022-3. This was previously an exhibition at Leamington Spa Art Gallery, 2022. Alice edited an academic publication for the exhibition with essays and completed comprehensive catalogue entries. Alice is completing a publication with Routledge: Spirituality, Feminism, Pre-Raphaelitism in Modern British Art and Culture, (forthcoming 2023), and has published several articles. Alice completed her PhD in the History of Art at the University of Warwick, was a Fellow in the Institute of Advanced Studies, (IAS), Warwick, 2016-17 and an Early Career Curator, Tate/Paul Mellon Centre, 2019-20. The Modern Pre-Raphaelite Visionaries project and publication have been generously supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Leamington Spa Art Gallery and the University of Warwick. Alice’s research interests include ‘forgotten’ British artists, Pre-Raphaelitism, Victorian and Edwardian British culture, feminism and spirituality in music and the arts across the twentieth century.