After four years of closure, the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery has partially reopened to welcome the city’s pre-Raphaelites back from a tour of the US. Victorian Radicals: From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts and Crafts Movement features familiar crowd-pleasers. Henry Wallis’s tiny portrait of Chatterton (1855-56) shows the poet sprawling exquisitely on his deathbed in modish mauve britches. Frederick Sandys’s furious wronged Medea (1866-68) clutches at her coral beads as she mutters incantations over her crucible. In other paintings, models Jane Morris and Fanny Cornforth give good hair.
