A new exhibition has opened in the gallery on the hill at Wilton Manor: The Pre-Raphaelites — Radical Romantics, a re-imagining of the nineteenth-century Brotherhood through the eyes of Ruritania. It runs daily through to April 2026, and entry is free to all visitors.
The original Pre-Raphaelites rejected the mechanical polish of academic art in favour of sincerity, detail and the luminous truth of nature. This show carries that impulse into a timeless realm of chivalric love, melancholy and myth — where saints and sinners, knights and muses meet once more beneath a filtered, digital dawn.
What makes the exhibition unusual is how it was made. Every work is a fresh composition created with Stable Diffusion, a modern tool of generative art — an experiment in whether twenty-first-century algorithms can echo nineteenth-century ideals. Each image is offered as both homage and experiment: a dialogue between tradition and technology, handcraft and machine-mind.
Twelve works hang across three rooms — The Founding Brotherhood, The Circle Expands and Rossetti's Legacy — from a reimagined Ophelia and The Lady of Shalott to Rossetti's muses and Collier's defiant Lilith. In the gallery, each painting carries a card linking to the artwork that inspired it, and many link to a piece of music, so visitors can wander the show with a soundtrack of their own. There is a visitors' book by the door — do sign it and leave a comment.
See it for yourself
Read the full gallery guide — every work and the story behind it — or teleport straight to the gallery on the hill.