At home with the Pre-Raphaelites

Andrew Lloyd Webber cried when he first came to Wightwick Manor, and standing in the Great Parlour of this magnificent Victorian villa you can see what moved him to tears of joy. Lloyd Webber loves the Pre-Raphaelites (he’s always had the common touch) and Wightwick is a living monument to the one artistic movement that England can truly call its own. There’s William Morris wallpaper on the walls and Charles Kempe stained glass in the windows — and beneath the minstrels’ gallery is Edward Burne-Jones’s ‘Love Among The Ruins’ (which has this month travelled to London for the biggest Pre-Raphaelite exhibition since the 1980s).

Tate Britain’s Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (on until 13 January) promises to be that rare thing, a blockbuster of a show devoted to an entirely English school of artists. Still frequently dismissed by smart sophisticates as sentimental chocolate box, the Pre-Raphaelites have actually aged far better than the modernist painters who usurped them.