OTTAWA.- The National Gallery of Canada presents Beauty’s Awakening: Drawings by the Pre-Raphaelites and Their Contemporaries from the Lanigan Collection. This exhibition expresses the richness, diversity and flair of British draftsmanship during the Victorian age (1837 to 1901), as seen through the eye of the discerning Saskatoon collector and donor Dennis T. Lanigan.

Through more than 120 stunning drawings, from preparatory sketches to highly finished drawings intended as works of art in and of themselves, visitors will discover how this passionate collector amassed a collection of works – outstanding by its scope in North America – that affords a panoramic view of the world of British art during the reign of Queen Victoria and reveals drawing in all its forms. Portraits, life studies, landscapes, allegories and scenes from religious and literary works are all represented.

While inviting contemplation of works by artists operating within the Aesthetic Movement and the Arts and Crafts Movement, the exhibition highlights the art of Pre-Raphaelite geniuses Edward Burne-Jones, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as well as that of Academic champions Edward Poynter and Frederic Leighton.

Painstakingly gathered over more than thirty years, the Lanigan Collection illustrates the new appreciation for the art of drawing in 19th-century England. Like the 1899 British play Beauty’s Awakening, which tells the story of how the knight Trueheart attempts to find and awake “the Spirit of all things beautiful,” the exhibition Beauty’s Awakening recounts the quest for a form of beauty that is rooted in the past – with styles and themes harking back to classical and medieval times, as well as the Renaissance – and yet totally current.

Gifts of Victorian works to the NGC: a long-standing tradition
The exhibition Beauty’s Awakening continues the commitment made by the National Gallery, when it was founded, to showcase British art. The artist Frederic Leighton was the first to offer the NGC a work in 1882, in response to an invitation extended to their British friends and artists by the Governor General of Canada, John Douglas Sutherland Campbell, Marquess of Lorne, and his wife, Princess Louise, daughter of Queen Victoria, who inaugurated the National Gallery in 1880. The second work came from John Everett Millais, one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who made a portrait of the Marquess and donated it to the Gallery in 1884.

For the past two decades, Dennis T. Lanigan has enriched Canada’s national collection through his donations of Victorian artworks. Thanks to his generosity, the NGC ranks among North America’s major centres for the study of Victorian art and is better able to fulfil its mandate to preserve and display master drawings.