Pre-Raphs to be the Laing Art Gallery's star attraction in 2026
Gallery unveils exhibition programme
One of the Laing Art Gallery’s most popular paintings is William Holman Hunt’s 1868 creation, Isabella and the Pot of Basil. Many visitors seek it out and when Isabella’s out on loan there’s a sense of loss.
In 2026 the painting will have pride of place along with others of its ilk in an exhibition called Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Poetry which the Laing are billing as the first in-depth exploration of the connection between Pre-Raphaelite art and poetry.
The radical Pre-Raphaelite art movement was started in the middle of the 19th Century by artists including Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais who, rejecting the teachings of the time, sought inspiration from Italian art before Raphael (1483-1510).
Pre-Raphaelite paintings are vivid, dramatic, highly detailed and often literary or moralistic in subject matter.
They have fallen in and out of fashion over the years but nowadays are widely loved and admired.
Julie Milne, chief curator of art galleries at North East Museums, calls this exhibition “long overdue and the highlight of the year”.
We are told it will “visually demonstrate the interconnections between fine and decorative art and the written word.
“It will be structured around the literary sources: from the early poetry of Dante Alighieri and Geoffrey Chaucer to Romantic poets such as John Keats; the Victorian visions of Alfred Tennyson to the poetry of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, Christina Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne and William Morris.”
As well as ‘Isabella’, the exhibition will showcase another Laing favourite, Laus Veneris by Edward Coley Burne-Jones.
The exhibition will also feature paintings and drawings by Hunt, Millais, Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown and Arthur Hughes but also work by women including Elizabeth Siddal (best known, perhaps unfairly, as a Pre-Raph artist’s model), Kate Bunce and Julia Margaret Cameron.
It’s still some way off, given that it’s scheduled to run from October 17 until February 13, 2027, but sounds well worth waiting for. It will be accompanied by a catalogue published by the Laing Art Gallery.
Before that comes another ‘must see’ attraction, the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award 2025 (wordily named but that’s owing to the law firm that sponsors it).
Running from March 28 to September 5, it’s the 43rd iteration of the National Portrait Gallery’s painting competition.
It will feature 46 portraits chosen for display by a panel of judges and exploring themes of cultural heritage, companionship, sexuality, illness, conflict and grief (better take some tissues).
Highlights, we are told, will be the winning self-portrait by Moira Cameron, Michelle Liu’s portrait, Kofi, winner of the Young Artist Award, and the second and third prize winners – respectively Cliff, Outreach Worker by Tim Benson and Memories by Martyn Harris.
Showing alongside it will be Exploring Identity, bringing together some of the finest portraits from the collections of the Laing, Shipley and Hatton galleries.
Artists represented will include Francis Bacon, Christina Robertson, Frederic Leighton, John Lavery, Harold Knight, Arthur Hughes, Norman Cornish, Robert Jobling and Harry Thubron.
All that’s for the future but opening this weekend (Saturday, December 20) in the Barbour Watercolour Gallery at the Laing is Sublime Landscapes featuring paintings from the Laing’s own collection.
On display will be work by John Robert Cozens, Mary Elizabeth Bennett, Francis Towne, David Cox, John Martin, Charles Napier Hemy, Edna Clarke Hall, Graham Sutherland, and Dennis Creffield.
The exhibition, with free admission, also gives the chance to view three new acquisitions presented by the Contemporary Art Society over the past 12 months.
They are Totes Mere by German artist Christiane Baumgartner and a pair of pictures by Emma Stibbon, Broken Terrain and Reynisdrangar.
Stibbon was also born in Germany, in 1962 when her father was serving there as one of the highest-ranking officers in the British Army, but is now based in Bristol.
The explanation from the Laing is that the three pictures were chosen because they resonated with its historic watercolours collection but also because the gallery aims to expand its holding of contemporary works on paper by women artists.
The exhibition runs until December 5, 2026.
Still showing at the Laing is Miniature Worlds: Little Landscapes from Thomas Bewick to Beatrix Potter (until February 28).
Find details of this and forthcoming attractions on the website of the Laing Art Gallery which is part of North East Museums.