Rossetti's Lady Lilith, begun in 1866 and reworked until 1873, is the Pre-Raphaelite stunner at its most concentrated form — a half-length portrait of a beautiful woman with long unbound hair, surrounded by Victorian symbolic props, named after Adam's mythical first wife from medieval Jewish folklore. The hidden contents, the model, the sonnet on its frame, and how Lilith entered Pre-Raphaelite painting.

In September 1848 three young London art students — Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt — founded a secret society in a Bloomsbury bedroom and signed their pictures with the initials PRB. They were attacking three centuries of European academic painting. Seven paintings from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and its second-generation followers.

A muse is not a model. A model sits for one painting. A muse sits for thirty, and slowly the painter's whole way of seeing rearranges itself around her face. The women below are the ones who reorganised the careers of the men who painted them.

The 19th-century novel and the Pre-Raphaelite painting were made at the same English moment and they answer each other almost on cue. Six Pre-Raphaelite-coded paintings for the reader of Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James — each painting matches the specific emotional register of one specific novel. The reader who loves Jane Eyre or Tess of the d'Urbervilles finds the visual companion.

A young woman in white drifts down the river toward Camelot in a small wooden boat, chains slipping from her hands, candles guttering. Reading Waterhouse's most famous Tennyson illustration — and the Pre-Raphaelite tradition it completed.