Romance is in the air: romance with a capital R, with religion, poetry, and medievalism thrown in. Tate Britain’s enormous show, which ends very soon, on January 13, has 180 works on view from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the group of young artists who rebelled against the art establishment in Victorian London. Over-familiarity is one of the group’s bugbears nowadays; being held as painters of pretty pictures another. This is why seeing their works in a new context is good — and not just paintings, but sculpture, photography and applied arts as well — and even if, for some, the show’s premise that it shows the Pre-Raphaelites as proto-modernists may be hard to take. Tate shows the group, formed in 1848, as radical, as Britain’s first modern art movement, in an era of political and social discontent. For example, their painting en plein air more than a decade before the Impressionists, and works are juxtaposed to show the Pre-Raphaelite’s influence on the developing Arts and Crafts movement.

All autumn there have been great gaps in local collections from loans to this reappraisal of the group led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais. The Ashmolean’s fabulous Prioress’s Tale Cabinet decorated by Burne-Jones as a wedding present to William Morris in 1858, never loaned before, has been at the show along with other works from the museum’s strong Pre-Raphaelite collection. William Morris’s bed too, from Kelmscott Manor (c1891), also a first-time loan, with its intricate embroideries by Jane and May Morris. And Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World (1851-2), probably the most famous image from Victorian times, absent from Keble College to hang next to its companion piece, The Awakening Conscience (1853-4) in a room entitled Salvation. Other loans are from Birmingham’s museums. You can’t turn around in this show without seeing classics, but there is a lot more to it than you might imagine. Like seeing the first works exhibited under the Pre-Raphaelite banner by Millais and Hunt (1848-9) hung next to the painting they had seen in the National Gallery by Lorenzo Monaco (painted 1407-9, that is ‘pre-Raphael’) — with its bright colours and clear outlines it directly inspired the young painters.

Tate Britain
Until Sunday
Tickets £14
tate.org.uk