The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge will open "A Call to Art: William Morris & the Pre-Raphaelites" on 23 October, running through 3 May 2027. The major exhibition revisits William Morris — designer, activist and visionary of the Pre-Raphaelite circle — alongside figures including Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Kate Faulkner, May Morris and Elizabeth Siddal.

Drawing on the Fitzwilliam's own collection with key loans from the Tate, the V&A, the William Morris Gallery, the Society of Antiquaries and the National Portrait Gallery, the show traces Morris's conviction that art and nature could answer industrialisation, pollution and mass production — ideals the museum argues feel newly urgent in a digital age. Rather than stopping at medieval romanticism and decorative design, it examines the circle's romantic vision of the past as a vehicle for imagining a fairer future.

A central thread is the women who made and sustained the movement's output. New research highlights Kate Faulkner, May Morris and Elizabeth Siddal as designers and makers in their own right, showing how their work opened pathways for other women in the field. The exhibition includes a poignant first-time display: a lock of Siddal's hair. Siddal, discovered working in a hat shop, modelled for Millais's Ophelia and was later Rossetti's muse and wife, but recognition of her own artwork came more than a century after her death in 1862. Also featured is her 1857 watercolour illustrating the poem Clerk Saunders, which Rossetti reportedly heavily directed.

The exhibition opens at a busy moment for Pre-Raphaelite scholarship: Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle opened "Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Poetry" on 17 October, also running through February.