During the 19th century the Pre-Raphaelites created countless images of medieval history and legends. Paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and others served as metaphors of an alternative world far away from the challenges of contemporary life. While British society was rapidly changing during the age of Empire and Industrialisation, pictures of perfect kings, saints and fairy tales offered the imagination a temporary escape, a place to lose oneself and a social ideal to aspire to.
In 2020 Bristol Museum & Art Gallery was meant to host a major exhibition on this subject with loans from Tate, the Fitzwilliam Museum and others, but the Covid-19 pandemic meant the show had to be cancelled. This lecture is a tour of our ‘lost’ show.
Speaker: Dr Jenny Gaschke, curator of pre-1900 art at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. Jenny studied Art History and Archaeology in Freiburg, Glasgow and Berlin. After working as assistant curator at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Jenny joined the curatorial team at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich in 2009. She has been a curator at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery since 2012.
£5 per Member as a donation to The Bristol Museums Development Trust