The Rossettis, Tate Britain review: Art, sex and death, Pre-Raphaelite style

This blockbuster show about the famous artist-poet family is suitably obsessed with death but gradually consumed by the life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

‘Beata Beatrix’, 1864 (Tate)

The Pre-Raphaelites don’t go away. Those hyper-religious, medievally fixated Victorian death-obsessives may seem perennial candidates for the dustbin of history, but iconic Pre-Raph works such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix and John Everett Millais’s Ophelia are regularly listed among the nation’s best-loved paintings. And with a little help from curators and museum directors, this beardie band of artist brothers regularly reinvent themselves in ways that make them appear relevant to the moment.

Tate Britain’s latest Pre-Raphaelite blockbuster focuses on the illustrious Rossetti family, which produced the movement’s de facto leader Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the celebrated poet Christina Rossetti. It’s out to rescue this talented brother and sister and their younger siblings, fellow poets Michael and Maria Rossetti, from Victorian fustiness, claiming them as pioneers of “modern beauty”, who “experimented with new forms of living”.

But the big media story ahead of the show has been Elizabeth “Lizzie” Siddal, Gabriel’s wife and principal muse who wasn’t, it seems, just the poster girl of Pre-Raphaelitism – as the model for both Beata Beatrix and Ophelia – but a significant artist who fed her better-known husband some of his pivotal ideas.