Laing Art Gallery Announces 2026 Programme – Pre-Raphaelites, National Portrait Gallery Exhibition, and More

The Laing Art Gallery’s 2026 programme features exciting, ground-breaking shows: Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Poetry, the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award 2025 on tour from the National Portrait Gallery, Sublime Landscapes, and Miniature Worlds: Little Landscapes from Thomas Bewick to Beatrix Potter, which is currently on display.

Julie Milne, Chief Curator of Art Galleries at North East Museums, said: ‘We have an exciting year ahead at the Laing Art Gallery with some stunning exhibitions, including the small but beautiful Sublime Landscapes and the National Portrait Gallery’s Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award 2025 alongside amazing portraits from our collection. 

 Long overdue, and the highlight of the year, will be our glorious exhibition Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Poetry, which will include some of the most well-known painters of the day such as William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and Julia Margaret Cameron. I do hope you can join us for what is going to be a year filled with inspirational art.’ 

Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Poetry

17 October 2026 – 13 February 2027

Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Poetry will be the first major exhibition to explore the connection between Pre-Raphaelite art and poetry in depth.

This innovative exhibition will visually demonstrate the interconnections between fine and decorative art and the written word. It will be structured around the literary sources: from the early poetry of Dante Alighieri and Geoffrey Chaucer to Romantic poets such as John Keats; the Victorian visions of Alfred Tennyson to the poetry of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, Christina Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and William Morris. Case studies focusing on specific poets and poems will enable the juxtaposition of different art forms made across the period from the late 1840s to the early twentieth century.

The exhibition will re-interpret two of the Laing Art Gallery’s best-loved paintings, Isabella and the Pot of Basil by William Holman Hunt and Laus Veneris by Edward Burne-Jones, in relation to their poetic subject matter. With key loans from public and private collections, it presents a rare opportunity to show these internationally significant paintings within the wider context of the art and poetry of the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements.

Paintings and drawings by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Ford Madox Brown, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and Arthur Hughes will be greatly enhanced by an emphasis on women artists and poets including Elizabeth Siddal, Kate Bunce, and Julia Margaret Cameron.

The exhibition also includes decorative art in a range of media including embroidery, metalwork, stained glass, tapestry, illuminated manuscripts, and books in addition to paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue published by the Laing Art Gallery.

Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award 2025 and Exploring Identity

28 March – 5 September 2026

This spring and summer, visitors will have the chance to chart the history of portrait painting from the 16th century to the present day in two complementary exhibitions containing some of the finest historic, modern, and contemporary portraits.

The Laing Art Gallery will show the National Portrait Gallery’s celebrated painting competition, the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award 2025, now in its 43rd year. The exhibition will be shown alongside Exploring Identity, a portraiture exhibition curated from North East Museums’ art collections that provides historical context to the Portrait Award.

The Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award 2025 features 46 portraits selected for display by a panel of judges and explores themes of cultural heritage, companionship, sexuality, illness, conflict, and grief. Highlights from the exhibition include a striking self-portrait by artist Moira Cameron, who has been named the winner, Michelle Liu’s portrait, Kofi, winner of the Young Artist Award, and the second and third prize winners are Cliff, Outreach Worker by Tim Benson and Memories by Martyn Harris.

Exploring Identity brings together some of the finest portraits from the Laing, Shipley, and Hatton Gallery collections. Highlights from the collections include works by Francis Bacon, Christina Robertson, Frederic Leighton, John Lavery, Harold Knight, and Arthur Hughes. Also represented are some of the North East’s most famous artists including Norman Cornish, Robert Jobling, and Harry Thubron. In this exhibition, portraits are so much more than just a physical likeness of a person—they are an embodiment of who that person is, their personal experiences, and their hopes for the future.

Sublime Landscapes

20 December 2025 – 5 December 2026

Sublime Landscapes features landscape watercolours and prints from the Laing Art Gallery’s collection responding to the potential for landscape art to be awe-inspiring. Visitors will encounter dramatic waterfalls, epic ruins, stormy seas, and subterranean worlds through the eyes of artists working between the eighteenth century – when the concept of the ‘sublime’ first gained prominence within landscape art – and the present day.

The artists on display include John Robert Cozens, Mary Elizabeth Bennett, Francis Towne, David Cox, John Martin, Charles Napier Hemy, Edna Clarke Hall, Graham Sutherland, and Dennis Creffield. 

The exhibition also presents the first opportunity to see three new acquisitions presented by the Contemporary Art Society in 2024-5: Totes Meer by Christiane Baumgartner, and Broken Terrain and Reynisdrangar by Emma Stibbon. The acquisitions were selected both due to their resonance with the historic watercolours collection and with the aim of building the gallery’s holdings of contemporary works on paper by women artists.

Sublime Landscapes is a free exhibition shown in the Barbour Watercolour Gallery.

Miniature Worlds: Little Landscapes from Thomas Bewick to Beatrix Potter

Until 28 February 2026

Miniature Worlds: Little Landscapes from Thomas Bewick to Beatrix Potter explores the intricate beauty of small-scale landscapes across three centuries of British art. The exhibition has a particular focus on vignette format illustrations and the changing relationship between text, illustration, and publishing.

Highlights of the exhibition include seven highly detailed watercolours by JMW Turner, whose 250th birthday is being celebrated this year, a dramatic and diminutive drawing by John Martin, and nine intricate watercolours by Beatrix Potter. The exhibition includes over 130 objects, 90 of which are loans from other UK collections.

Image: Laus Veneris by Edward Coley Burne-Jones (c 1873-1875). Laing Art Gallery