How to Bring Pre-Raphaelite Intimacy into a Modern Australian Home

The Pre-Raphaelites are the historical movement Australian customers ask about more than any other — partly because the Waterhouses have, in the last decade, become the default reference for a certain kind of romantic, narrative wall art, and partly because the saturated colour reads well on a modern white wall. They are also, surprisingly, the movement most often hung badly.

The problem is not the pictures. The problem is that the Pre-Raphaelites have a specific kind of intensity that asks for a specific kind of company. Get the company right and the picture works. Get the company wrong and you have a Waterhouse hanging in a hotel-lobby living room, looking confused. This piece is about how to get the company right.

The mood Pre-Raphaelite art brings to a room

If the Baroque is theatre and the Romantic is weather, the Pre-Raphaelite is a held breath. The pictures are about an emotional moment frozen at its peak — the second Ophelia stops singing, the second the Lady of Shalott begins to drift, the second Hylas notices the nymphs. The room around the picture takes on that quality.

This makes the Pre-Raphaelite a more inward movement to live with than the others. A Caravaggio hung in a living room makes the room dramatic. A Constable makes it expansive. A Pre-Raphaelite makes it private — even when the people in the room are not alone.

It also makes the Pre-Raphaelite a romantic-in-the-modern-sense choice. The pictures are stories about longing and loss, painted by people who were, themselves, mostly very young and very much in love. Living with one is like having a piece of intensely autobiographical music in the room. It is the right choice for some rooms and the wrong one for others. You should know which is which before you buy.

The corresponding warning: the Pre-Raphaelites have, on average, more red and gold than any other historical movement, and they can overwhelm a small room. If your living room is under 25 square metres, hang a smaller Pre-Raphaelite and consider mounting the picture against a darker wall rather than a paler one. The exception is the very late, paler Burne-Jones — the Golden Stairs palette — which can take a brighter, paler room.

Which rooms suit it best

Bedrooms are the natural home of the Pre-Raphaelite. The pictures are private. They reward repeated looking. They were, in many cases, originally hung in bedrooms by the Victorians who first bought them. A small Waterhouse above a bedhead is a piece of staging that works in most Australian bedrooms.

Libraries, reading rooms, and the small dens that some Australian houses still have are the other natural home. A Pre-Raphaelite picture and a reading chair are a combination that, somewhere between Tennyson’s death in 1892 and our own century, has become a cultural shorthand for a certain kind of indoor afternoon. The two go together because the pictures themselves are literary — they want to be looked at the way a poem is read.

Living rooms can take the Pre-Raphaelites, but the rules are different from the other movements. You want one big Pre-Raphaelite, never two. The pictures are not designed to share a wall. A single Waterhouse, framed slightly more formally than you would frame a Constable, above a sofa or a sideboard, is the canonical setup. Two Waterhouses on the same wall is two ghosts trying to talk over each other.

Stairwells take them surprisingly well, particularly the vertical compositions. The Soul of the Rose, hung on the half-landing of a stairwell, is one of those bits of staging that catches you slightly off-guard every time you walk past it.

The rooms the Pre-Raphaelite does not work in are the bright, social rooms — the modern open-plan kitchen-dining-living space that dominates Australian houses built since 2000. The pictures need quiet. They need to be approached, not glanced at over someone’s shoulder while you are talking. An open-plan room generates the wrong kind of attention.

Pairing with Australian colour palettes

The Pre-Raphaelite palette is dominated by three families. The deep jewel colours — the emerald greens, the sapphire blues, the burgundy reds — that recur in the early Brotherhood pictures. The saturated golds of the late Waterhouse and Leighton. The cool, paler hues of the late Burne-Jones.

For the jewel-toned pictures, you want a paler wall colour. Whisper White. Hog Bristle. Antique White USA. The picture’s depth comes from contrast with the wall, and a dark wall will eat the contrast. The temptation, particularly with the Rossettis, to surround the picture with a deep teal or oxblood is real and should be resisted. The picture will lose its weight against a dark wall.

For the gold-saturated Waterhouses and Leightons, you have more flexibility. A warm cream wall works. A pale dove grey works. Even a soft sage green will work, because the gold in the picture lifts it. The picture that pairs best with the warmer end of the Australian neutral palette is, in our experience, Flaming June. The orange of the dress against a cream wall is a single chord, played loud.

For the pale Burne-Jones, you want the cooler end of the palette — a pale grey, a Scandi white, a soft blue-white. The picture itself is half whispering and it needs a wall that whispers too.

Pairing with furniture styles

The Pre-Raphaelites are the historical movement that pairs most naturally with traditional Australian furniture. The Victorian and Edwardian cedar pieces — the upright cabinets, the dining tables with turned legs — were made in roughly the same decades the pictures were painted, and the visual vocabulary matches. A Waterhouse above a cedar sideboard in a Federation home is a combination that works without anyone having to work at it.

The combination that does not work is high-end modern minimalist. The Pre-Raphaelite picture wants more company than that — books on a shelf, a textured rug, a reading lamp, a piece of pottery. A Waterhouse in a room that is otherwise austere reads as out of place. The picture’s density needs material density around it.

Mid-century takes the Pre-Raphaelites unevenly. The Featherston armchair under a Waterhouse works if you commit to the look. The Saarinen tulip table under a Rossetti does not work, because the table’s clean geometry argues with the picture’s medieval drapery.

A specific recommendation for Australian sitting rooms: a Waterhouse or a Leighton above a low Victorian-style sideboard, with a bowl of fruit or a ceramic vase on the sideboard, a tall reading lamp in the corner, a deep upholstered chair within range, and books visible somewhere in the room. This is the canonical Pre-Raphaelite setup, and it works in any Australian climate provided the room has some quiet to it.

Frame and finish choices

The Pre-Raphaelites originally hung in heavy gilt frames, often designed by the artists themselves — Rossetti and Burne-Jones were both serious frame designers, and the original frames are sometimes worth as much as the pictures. This is the historical fact. Translating it to a modern Australian home requires care.

The all-out option — a heavy gold frame — works if your house has the architectural depth for it. A high-ceilinged Edwardian living room, a Hawthorn double-fronted with original cornices, a Sydney inner-west semi with picture rails. Otherwise it tips into hotel-restaurant territory.

The safer option is a slim warm-gold frame, hand-finished, with a thin profile — perhaps 30mm wide. This gives the picture the gold halo it asks for without overwhelming the wall.

The third option, and the one we recommend most often, is a slim oak float frame on a stretched canvas. This is the modern Australian solution. The picture stays the focus, the timber tone picks up the gold inside the painting, and the frame does not compete with the picture or with the room.

The option to avoid is a black frame. The Pre-Raphaelites do not work behind black. The colour relationships in the picture were designed for a gold context, and a black frame fights every red and green inside the painting. Use black for Baroque. Use gold or oak for Pre-Raphaelite.

Sizing and hanging height

The Pre-Raphaelite originals are, on average, smaller than Romantic landscapes. Millais’s Ophelia is just over a metre wide. The Lady of Shalott is just under a metre and a half. Beata Beatrix is less than a metre tall. The pictures rarely need to be enormous to do their work.

The Australian rule of thumb is to size the printed picture to roughly the same dimensions as the original, where possible. This is unusual advice — for the Baroque and the Romantic we recommend sizing larger — but the Pre-Raphaelite was painted for closeness, not for big-wall impact, and a smaller print held up by careful framing reads better than a wall-filling reproduction.

The hanging height follows the standard rule: the centre of the picture at 145 centimetres from the floor. The one exception is the very vertical Pre-Raphaelite compositions — The Soul of the Rose, The Magic Circle, the late Burne-Jones figures — where the centre of the figure (typically the face, near the top of the canvas) should be at eye level. This may mean the picture as a whole sits slightly lower than you would otherwise expect, with its midpoint at 130 centimetres rather than 145. Trust the figure rather than the maths.

The Australian-specific recommendation

The Pre-Raphaelite that works most reliably in an Australian home, in our experience, is John William Waterhouse’s The Magic Circle. The reason is partly the palette — the warm golds, the burgundy of the witch’s cloak, the dark of the background — and partly the composition. The figure is contained. She is in the centre of the canvas, looking inward at her own conjuring. The painting does not pull the eye out into distance the way a Constable or a Friedrich does. It pulls the eye in toward the figure.

This makes The Magic Circle the picture that does best in the smaller, contained rooms that dominate Australian housing — the second living room, the den, the room at the back of a Queenslander. It also pairs well with most contemporary Australian colour schemes, because the burgundy in the picture picks up the warm timbers and the gold lifts the surrounding wall colour.

Soft close

The Pre-Raphaelites were painted by people who took their feelings seriously and assumed that the people looking at the pictures would do the same. Living with one is, in a quiet way, an agreement to that arrangement.

If a Pre-Raphaelite piece is calling to you for a particular room, the prints below are a good place to start. We print on Australian-made canvas in our Adelaide studio, hand-stretched and ready to hang. The full Renaissance & Classical Art Prints collection includes most of the works named above. For more on the movement itself, see what Pre-Raphaelite art is and why it still hangs in the great galleries; for a tour of the major works, the twelve iconic Pre-Raphaelite paintings piece is the place to go. Or step into the older, calmer chamber of the Renaissance in an Australian home.

Also worth reading: anniversary gifts by material — why cotton canvas art suits an anniversary gift.

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