Love School, The

1 9 7 5 (UK)
6 x 75 minute episodes

This six-part BBC drama series told the story of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of Victorian artists from 1848 to the 1880s. This was the period of revolutions throughout Europe, but in London, the major upheaval was confined to the art world.

The series began with William Holman Hunt (Bernard Lloyd), a young student at the Royal Academy of Arts, discovering the critical writing of John Ruskin (David Collings) – the most celebrated art critic of the time – who encouraged all young artists to “go to nature, rejecting, selecting, scorning nothing”.

Hunt shared this revelation with the Academy’s boy wonder, John Everett Millais (Peter Egan), and the Acadamey rebel and bohemian poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Ben Kingsley).

It was hot-blooded and romantic Gabriel Rosetti (Gabby to his friends) who proposed a secret society devoted to breaking all traditional artistic rules and dogmas. With relatives and friends recruited willy-nilly, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood became a reality, and the art revolution began.

Returning to London from a two-year painting expedition to the Holy Land, Hunt found that his carefully laid plans to educate his exuberantly common model and mistress Annie Miller (Sheila White) during his absence had gone astray.

Though she now dressed, spoke, and thought more like a lady, her morals were decidedly capricious, and a break seemed inevitable.

Millais – married and about to become a father – was anxious to put his career on a sound financial footing. Feverishly, he prepared no less than six paintings for the Roya! Academy Exhibition, but working at this pace, he could not remain true to his ideals and was derided by the critics for his slapdash art.

He enjoyed considerable commercial success and seemed to be doing just as well romantically with the beautiful wife of John Ruskin.

Meanwhile, Jane Morris (Kika Markham) had a passionate affair with Rossetti.

There were suicides, elopements, public scandals, drug addiction, midnight disinterments and the splendid idiosyncratic excesses of the Victorian art world.

And above all, there were the rich, radiant, pre-Raphaelite paintings and designs.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Ben Kingsley
Lizzie Siddal
Patricia Quinn
John Everett Millais
Peter Egan
William Morris
David Burke
William Holman Hunt
Bernard Lloyd
John Ruskin
David Collings
Edward Burne-Jones
Kenneth Colley
Frederick Stephens
David Troughton
Jane Morris
Kika Markham
William Rossetti
Nickolas Grace
Annie Miller
Sheila White
Effie Millais
Anne Kidd
Christina Rossetti
Aviva Goldkorn
Thomas Woolner
Gareth Hunt
William Millais
David Wood
Mrs Rossetti
Izabella Telezynska
Queen Victoria
Christine Ozanne
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Frank Vincent
Thomas Combe
Desmond Llewelyn
George Bernard Shaw
Struan Rodger

Episodes

The Brotherhood | An Impeccable Elopement | Seeking the Bubbles | Remember Me | Beata Beatrix | The Artisan