The Random Shot by John Everett Millais

Best Pre-Raphaelites Paintings

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founded in 1848 by seven young artists who banded together against what they felt was an artificial and mannered approach to painting taught at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. Inspired by the theories of John Ruskin, who urged artists to ‘go to nature’, they believed in an art of serious subjects treated

Vanity by Frank Cadogan Cowper

The subject matter and composition of ‘Vanity’ are derived from Italian Renaissance painting. Cowper has bedecked his youthful beauty with jewels and given her a hand-mirror to signify vanity. She stands before a vine, heavy with ripe grapes, suggestive of abundance and pleasure. Although this painting is secular in subject, the pose of a woman

“So like a shatter’d Column lay the King” by Julia Margaret Cameron

Portrait of Mary Hillier, William Warder, Mrs. Hardinge, an unidentified woman, and two hooded figures in costume and posing as the characters from the accompanying Alfred, Lord Tennyson poems titled “The Passing of Arthur”. Two of the women, Vivien and Morgan le Fay, place a dying King Arthur in a wooden boat to take him

The Sleeping Beauty by John Collier

This remarkable picture is eloquent testimony to the survival of Pre-Raphaelite values well into the twentieth century. Dating from as late as 1921, it treats the famous fairy story of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ that had been told many times in European literature. Its origins obscure, in the seventeenth century it was included by Charles Perrault in

Vigilance by Henry Wyatt

Entre la richesse et l’amour by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

Reverie by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Lady Clementina Hawarden Photographs

Clementina Maude, Viscountess Hawarden, née Clementina Elphinstone Fleeming (1822-1865), was one of five children of Admiral Charles Elphinstone Fleeming (1774-1840), and Catalina Paulina Alessandro (1800-1880). In 1845, she married Cornwallis Maude, 4th Viscount Hawarden; the couple had eight children. She was a noted British amateur portrait photographer of the Victorian Era. She produced over 800

Nonchaloir by John Singer Sargent

Sargent’s inordinate technical facility, coupled with his ability to portray elegant sitters in sumptuous surroundings, made him extremely popular with wealthy patrons on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite his success as one of the most sought after portraitists of the late Victorian era, Sargent eventually became exasperated by the whim and vanities of prominent