Art

Love and Desire: Pre-Raphaelite Masterpieces from the Tate (National Gallery of Australia)

by Keren Rosa Hammerschlag •

ABR Arts • 13 December 2018

Art

Love and Desire: Pre-Raphaelite Masterpieces from the Tate (National Gallery of Australia)

by Keren Rosa Hammerschlag •

ABR Arts • 13 December 2018

The National Gallery of Australia’s current Pre-Raphaelite survey exhibition, co-curated by Carol Jacobi from Tate and Lucina Ward from the NGA, feels like a family reunion. John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1851–52) and John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott (1888) have made the long voyage from England to join stellar works from Australian collections, such as Roddam Spencer Stanhope’s ‘Why seek ye the living among the dead?’ St Luke, Chapter XIV, verse 5 (c.1875–90) from the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Also in attendance are lesser-known pieces, such as Robert Braithwaite Martineau’s Kit’s writing lesson (1852), that, on occasion, dare to outshine some of the more iconic images.

Keren Rosa Hammerschlag

Keren Rosa Hammerschlag is a Lecturer in Art History and Curatorship in the Centre for Art History and Art Theory in the School of Art & Design at the Australian National University. Following the completion of her PhD in Art History at the Courtauld Institute or Art, she undertook a three-year Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Centre for the Humanities and Health at King’s College London. From 2013-2018 she taught in Art History and Women’s and Gender Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century painting, and the intersections between art and medicine during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. She is the author of Frederic Leighton: Death, Mortality, Resurrection (Ashgate / Routledge; 2015) and numerous articles on Victorian neoclassicism and medical portraiture. She is currently writing a book about the representation of racial difference and racial hybridity in Victorian painting.