Desperate Romantics is a six-part television drama serial about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, first broadcast on BBC Two between 21 July and 25 August 2009.
Publicity still portraying (left to right) Samuel Barnett as John Everett Millais, Sam Crane as Fred Walters, Aidan Turner as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Rafe Spall as William Holman Hunt.
One of the disclaimer slides that appear at the beginning of each episode.
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and art critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Woolner who formed a seven-member "Brotherhood" partly modelled on the Nazarene movement. The Brotherhood was only ever a loose association and their principles were shared by other artists of the time, including Ford Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes and Marie Spartali Stillman. Later followers of the principles of the Brotherhood included Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris and John William Waterhouse.
Proserpine, 1874, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with Jane Morris as model
Illustration by Holman Hunt of Thomas Woolner's poem "My Beautiful Lady", published in The Germ, 1850
Christ in the House of His Parents, by John Everett Millais, 1850
Ophelia, by John Everett Millais, 1851–52