Over the summer of 1857 three Oxford undergraduates, Rossetti, Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, shared rooms in George Street.

BBC: Rossetti: Pre-Raphaelite muse pictures at auction

Rossetti and Burne-Jones spotted Jane at the theatre and asked her to become one of their models, who they nicknamed "stunners".

BBC: Rossetti: Pre-Raphaelite muse pictures at auction

Rossetti, probably the most visually imaginative of them and certainly the most influential on the later generation of Morris and Burne-Jones was often hampered by his uncertain draftsmanship and grasp of perspective.

WSJ: Victorian Avant-Garde | Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design | National Gallery of Art | By Barrymore Laurence Scherer

Also on display are 50 objects from the collections of the Yale Center for British Art and elsewhere at Yale, including maps, atlases, and works by Samuel Palmer, Edward Burne-Jones and August Welby Pugin.

FORBES: Copy Of 'Magna Carta' On Display In New Haven

Comprising some 130 works by Burne-Jones, Hunt, John Everett Millais, Morris, Rossetti and others of their circle, this is the first major U.S. retrospective of the well-beloved but highly debated legacy of 19th-century British art.

WSJ: Victorian Avant-Garde | Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design | National Gallery of Art | By Barrymore Laurence Scherer

These and other works exemplify the expressive qualities of Pre-Raphaelite art brought to their zenith in Burne-Jones's Arthurian paintings and tapestries: the dreamlike sense of dim recollections viewed behind closed eyes, of erotic yearning conveyed through powerful silence.

WSJ: Victorian Avant-Garde | Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design | National Gallery of Art | By Barrymore Laurence Scherer

These include William Holman Hunt's beautiful "The Eve of Saint Agnes" (after Keats's poem) and the very early "Arming of a Knight" chair decorated by William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (exhibited with a youthful self-caricature by Edward Burne-Jones in which he depicts himself admiring that chair while seated on it).

WSJ: Victorian Avant-Garde | Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design | National Gallery of Art | By Barrymore Laurence Scherer