The Pre-Raphaelites & their Circle. Expert Manchester tour.

The Pre-Raphaelites & their Circle in Manchester. Expert tour.
Thursday 12 February 2026.
2.30pm start outside St Ann's Church.

Ed Glinert, official Manchester tour guide and author of Penguin’s Manchester Compendium, leads this fascinating fact-filled tour around Manchester Art Gallery’s best-loved Victorian paintings with an extra portion of high art at two local churches.

***

The Pre-Raphaelites were Britain’s most important art school. They were aesthetes and zealots determined to bring honesty, drama and colourful vitality to staid Victorian painting.

They were formed in 1848, the year of revolution across Europe. But this was no political coup. This was art terrorism, powered by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais.

Reacting against the reactionary nature of Joshua Reynolds and the Royal Academy, the Pre-Raphaelites wished to create a body of work similar in brightness of colour, attention to detail, and honest simplicity to the period of Italian painting prior to Raphael Sanzio (1483-1520).

Rossetti wanted the group’s name to include the then fashionable term “Early Christian”, but when Hunt objected he proposed “Pre-Raphaelite”. Rossetti then added the word “Brotherhood”, as he wanted the society to be secret, in line with the Italian political group the Carbonaris in that year of revolution across Europe. When the artists staged their first exhibition Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Girlhood of Mary Virgin was signed “PRB” to maintain the society’s air of mystery.

Manchester has an unrivalled collection of the PRB’s works, dominated by William Holman Hunt’s spiritual Light of the World, his daring Shadow of Death and the eerie Scapegoat. This is art which benefits from intense scrutiny; from unravelling and demystifying the religious connotations and human dramas involved.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher New Manchester Walks