When muse and artist Elizabeth Siddall died in 1862, her grief-stricken husband Dante Gabriel Rosetti tucked a book of his poetry in her coffin beneath her long red hair.
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"She was never very well, it's quite mysterious as to what her illness was ... maybe it was just living with Rosetti that was driving her mad because he was not a very faithful lover," art historian Professor Christiana Payne told The Courier.
"Then she died of an overdose ... Rosetti felt guilty about it the rest of his life. He had a manuscript of his poems and he buried them with her."
The romantic gesture - which he would revoke six years later by arranging to have the coffin dug up to retrieve for publication - is just one of the many intriguing tales surrounding the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, whose rarely-seen drawings and pre-sketches will be on show this winter at the Art Gallery of Ballarat in Pre-Raphaelites: Drawings and Watercolours.
"What's really beautiful about [the exhibition] is it's very intimate ... in that you really get to see the relationships between the artists, which I don't think have really been explored in any exhibition prior to this," gallery director Louise Tegart said.
"You start to see not only the relationships between the seven artists who actually established the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but then how their influence [spanned] a much bigger and wider circle over many, many years.
"It's that really beautiful sense of the interconnections between the friendships and the lovers, so there's some really fantastic stories behind the artworks in the exhibition."
Formed in 1848 in London by a group of seven artists, including Rosetti, the Brotherhood rejected the British Royal Academy of Arts' promotion of Renaissance master Raphael and, more broadly, contemporary output of the era, seeking instead to make art as similar to the real world as possible.
"They saw themselves as young rebels ... they put 'PRP' on their paintings when they exhibited them but didn't tell anybody what the letters meant," Professor Payne said.
"There was mystery hanging around them and then when it came out they had called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, critics were really shocked and there was backlash.
"People said their work was ugly, it was harsh, and they were just copying the weaknesses of 15th century art."
Art critic John Ruskin, who was particularly adoring of the works of PRB founding member John Everett Millais, played a major part in the group's acceptance in England at the time.
"He took the side of the Pre-Raphaelites and defended them ... that turned their fortunes around. Instead of being reviled they were suddenly much more respectable," Professor Payne said.
Among the 75 works on loan from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, gallery-goers will find a sketch of Ruskin by Millais, sketched before Ruskin's wife Effie left him for Millais and their friendship soured.
"It's a very slight drawing. [Ruskin's] standing in a rocky stream holding his hat, and Millais wrote about the drawing and said, 'I'm going to paint him looking over the edge of a steep waterfall. He looks so sweet and benign, standing calmly looking into the turbulent sluice beneath'," Professor Payne said.
"Actually, he wasn't really sweet and benign at all, because he'd been very cruel to Effie, and Millais soon discovered that."
The rift between the pair, in part, has been attributed to the disbanding of the PRB in 1853.
Another work in the exhibition, a portrait of Pre-Raphaelite William Morris' wife, Jane Morris in Icelandic Costume, fuelled speculation of an affair between Jane and Rosetti.
"In 1871, [William Morris] went to Iceland ... He and Rosetti had taken a joint tenancy of an old manor house near Oxford," Professor Payne said.
"[Rosetti] just drew [Jane] obsessively. There's also one where she's just lying on a sofa reading the paper ... but very often he depicts her as some sort of goddess.
"William Morris went away for the summer leaving his wife and Rossetti together in this house, so it seems that he sort of accepted their relationship."
Arguably the most infamous tale of the PRB is of the painting of Millais' Ophelia, when then-19-year-old Siddall posed in a wedding dress, catching pneumonia after floating for hours in freezing bathwater for the artwork.
While Ophelia is not on display, the Ballarat-exclusive exhibition will feature Siddall's drawings, and other works by female artists central to the PRB.
"It shows another side, that the women were not just passive subjects. They were also actively involved as artists in their own right," Ms Tegart said.
Founding member the Brotherhood William Holman Hunt's pre-sketches for renowned painting Light of the World will also be shown.
"[The painting] toured to Australia in 1906 and, at that point in time, Australia's population was about five million people and 4 million people turned out to go and see that artwork," Ms Tegart said.
"It's been really taken up as a symbol of Christianity but when you dig deeper into the story ... the [open] lanterns [were] a symbol Holman Hunt was trying to get across about God actually being accepting of all religions. It was quite radical work."
Light of the World imagery is oft-recreated in stained glass windows across Australia, and can be seen at three churches in Ballarat alone.
Alongside Pre-Raphaelites, exhibition In the Company of Morris will show historical and contemporary Australian artworks, exploring the widespread and ongoing influence of the Brotherhood.
It was William Morris who said, "what business do we have with art at all unless we can share it", and it is this philosophy upon which the foundation for the Art Gallery of Ballarat was built, seen in its founding motto; 'not for self but for all'.
The relationship between Ballarat and the Pre-Raphaelites, Ms Tegart said, was "an untold story".
Ballarat was growing as a goldrush town when Pre-Raphaelites Thomas Woolner, Bernhard Smith and Edward La Trobe Bateman came to the goldfields to continue their careers and spread the word of the Brotherhood.
"This is a really incredible Australian story that's not really ever been told before. What we always try to do in bringing in an exhibition, we try and relate it back to our own history and our own collection," she said.
"So In the Company of Morris is really about that ongoing influence of the Pre-Raphaelites and William Morris, particularly on Australia."
The exhibitions opened Saturday May 20, 2023 and will run through to August 6, 2023.
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