Art appreciation can feel intimidating from the outside, full of dates and movements and names you’re worried you’ll pronounce wrong.
But it’s not an exclusive club. It’s a conversation. And it is absolutely open to anyone who is curious.
This is a gentle guide for people who want to begin with a sense of welcome. A soft invitation into a world that has shaped cultures, sparked revolutions, and whispered truths across centuries.
Flaming June, Frederic Leighton
Begin With What Moves You
Start with the pieces that make you stop for a moment, noticing a feeling or a thought you didn’t expect.
Maybe it’s:
a single painting you can’t stop looking at (or thinking about.)
a color that feels like home
a story behind a portrait
a sculpture that makes you wonder
or even a meme that made you laugh and realize, “Wait, this is art?”
Open with your own spark. Let curiosity lead you. The best journeys always begin that way.
Visiting one of my favorite works, Dame Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, painted by John Singer Sargent (Tate Britain)
There Are Many Ways to Look at Art
Some people approach art analytically, studying technique and composition. Others are drawn to symbolism and story. Many simply stand before a painting and feel a spark of recognition or stillness. Seeing art in person can be transformative, but not everyone can travel to museums, and that’s okay. Art meets us wherever we are: in books, on screens, in community spaces, or in the sudden moment an image lingers with us long after.
All of these experiences are valid. You might decode a picture like a puzzle, or let it wash over you. Some works ask for analysis; others simply sit beside you, quiet and companionable.
Art is not a test.
It’s an experience.
Stories Are the Easiest Way In
Every piece of art was made by a person living through something, whether it was joy, grief, desire, fear, or simply boredom, their experience informed their work.
Learning their stories opens a door for you, inviting you to take part of the dance between artist and viewer.
Ask:
Who made this?
What was happening in their life?
What did they hope people would see?
What were they afraid people would see?
Who were they painting for?
You don’t need to memorize biographies. Just follow the thread of humanity. It’s there. It’s always there.
Madonna and Child, Westminster Abbey
Details Speak Volumes
When you look at a painting, try noticing just one small thing:
the way light hits a shoulder
the choice of a flower
a gesture of the hand
shadows that don’t quite match
clothing that tells a story
These details are like whispers from the artist across time. Once you start noticing them, art becomes infinitely richer.
Illustration from The Bells and Other Poems, Edmund Dulac
Let Your Emotions Be Part of the Process
Appreciating art is not only about intellect, it’s about feeling.
Ask yourself:
What emotion rises first?
Do the colors comfort or unsettle me?
What story do I see here?
You’re allowed to bring your whole, complicated human self into the experience. In fact, you must.
Explore Slowly; No Need For a Syllabus
One painting will lead you to another. One artist will introduce you to their circle. One movement will spark curiosity about what came before or after.
Follow:
threads
fascinations
moods
themes
moments of “Wait, who is that?”
Experience work not through rigid order, but through curiosity.
Soir Bleu, Edward Hopper
Start With Artists Who Make You Feel Something
If you need ideas, these are beautiful entry points for beginners:
They are welcoming artists, generous artists, who reward even the briefest attention.
Or take a moment to ponder how we approach conventional standards of beauty in my post Rethinking Rossetti.
Art History Belongs to You Too
One of the greatest myths is that art history is reserved for experts. The truth is that art has always been meant for all people. It was created to be seen, felt, interpreted, misinterpreted, loved, questioned, treasured.
You don’t need credentials to experience beauty. Or training to feel wonder. No one needs permission to fall in love with a painting.
All you need is openness. And a little time.
A visit to Tate Britain
The point is not to master a timeline but to join a lineage of looking, a lineage of people who believed beauty was worth paying attention to.
Art meets you exactly where you are, there’s no pretense and no prerequisites. And if you allow it to linger with you, it will shape you in subtle ways, that may only whisper their presence years later.
“The first step in any encounter with art is to do nothing, to just watch, giving your eye a chance to absorb all that’s there. We shouldn’t think “This is good,” or “This is bad,” or “This is a Baroque picture which means X, Y, Z.” Ideally, for the first minute we shouldn’t think at all. Art needs time to perform its work on us.” Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me
Beauty can be a slippery thing. It shifts as we age, evolves as the world changes, and often hides beneath layers of expectation we never meant to carry.
Yet more than 170 years ago, a small group of young artists barely out of their teens, glimpsed this struggle. In 1848, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood broke away from the conventions of Victorian art and turned toward a different vision: one steeped in honesty, emotion, and fearless beauty. And somehow, their lessons still feel startlingly modern.
Beauty Begins With Looking Closely
The Pre-Raphaelites believed that truth lived in the details. A single curl of hair, the glint of light on a glass vase, the veins of an ivy leaf.
Isabella and the Pot of Basil, William Holman Hunt
In a world that encourages us to scroll, skim, and rush, their work whispers a gentle rebellion: slow down.
Beauty can reveal itself when you take the time to actually look.
This isn’t just about art. It’s about the small joys we tuck into our days and the parts of ourselves we forget to notice. The Pre-Raphaelites remind us that beauty waits quietly and patiently for us to witness it.
Victorian ideals seem to have demanded a tight corset on everything, from bodies to behaviors and emotions. The Pre-Raphaelites loosened the laces. They painted women who looked real: weary, dreamy, fierce, wounded, complicated. Instead of polished elegance, they offered depth, interiority, and emotional truth.
In an era obsessed with filters and symmetry, their work suggests a radical counterpoint: beauty expands when perfection stops being the goal.
Freckles, softness, expression, sorrow, thoughtfulness… we recognize ourselves in these things more than in flawless surfaces.
Ophelia, Arthur Hughes
Beauty Is Story, Not Just Surface
Most Pre-Raphaelite paintings are a narrative. Ophelia doesn’t simply float among flowers; she carries centuries of grief and interpretation with her. Mariana doesn’t merely lean in a chair; she embodies waiting, longing, and resilience. Elizabeth Siddal isn’t just a model. She is a poet, an artist, a woman whose inner life shaped the very movement that immortalized her face.
Their art reminds us that beauty is not an aesthetic metric but a lived story.
Even our own reflection becomes richer when we remember the layers behind it, the experiences we’ve survived, the passions that shape us, the people we’ve loved, the creativity that pulls us forward.
La Ghirlandata, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Beauty Is a Conversation With the Past
The Pre-Raphaelites reached back to medieval tapestries, Arthurian legends, Shakespearean tragedies, and Renaissance texts. They found beauty not by chasing novelty but by entering into dialogue with history. In doing so, they built a bridge between eras, proof that beauty persists across centuries because it speaks to something unchanging in us.
Today, when trends rise and fall with dizzying speed, their work encourages a deeper kind of grounding. Beauty endures when we root it in something lasting, when it connects us to more than the moment in front of us Whether that’s art, literature, nature, spirituality, or personal history, the result is the same: a beauty that feels lived in rather than disposable.
The Defense of Guenevere, Jane Morris
We Create Beauty, We Don’t Simply Receive It
The Brotherhood didn’t wait to get permission from the artistic establishment, they feverishly strove to champion their message. They met frequently, worked hard, and debated fiercely to hone their ideas. No doubt they made mistakes, but always tried again. And they chose, deliberately, to create something that felt true rather than something that felt safe.
This is a powerful reminder today, where we see beauty presented as something to acquire through products, diets, or trends, rather than something to shape with our own hands.
The Pre-Raphaelites teach us that creativity is beauty. Curiosity is beauty. Craft is beauty. The act of making art, thought, or meaning is itself a form of self representation more honest than any mirror.
Proserpine, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Beauty Holds Both Light and Shadow
Pre-Raphaelite canvases glow with saturated color, luminous skin, and jewel-like natural details. Yet woven through that radiance is sorrow: Ophelia’s impending death, Proserpine’s captivity, the haunted longing of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s later work. Their beauty is never naive; it is beauty with full knowledge of darkness and melancholy.
Lachrymae, Lord Frederic Leighton
This feels especially relevant today, when many of us are learning to hold joy and grief simultaneously. The Pre-Raphaelites show us that beauty can contain sadness without collapsing. It can reflect the complexity of real life and still shimmer.
Beauty Is an Act of Paying Attention to Yourself
Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Elizabeth Siddal once wrote, “I care not for my lady’s soul / Though I worship before her smile.” She was pointing to a gaze that never moves beyond the surface; a lover who praises beauty yet ignores the woman’s mind, heart, and inner life. In The Lust of the Eyes, Siddal urges us to redirect that close, reverent attention inward: toward the soft places we neglect, the thoughts we quiet, the dreams we delay, the parts of ourselves that deserve to be seen with the same care we give to great works of art. To live with beauty today means to acknowledge yourself as a worthy subject.
I care not for my Lady’s soul Though I worship before her smile; I care not where be my Lady’s goal When her beauty shall lose its wile. Low sit I down at my Lady’s feet Gazing through her wild eyes Smiling to think how my love will fleet When their starlike beauty dies. I care not if my Lady pray To our Father which is in Heaven But for joy my heart’s quick pulses play For to me her love is given. Then who shall close my Lady’s eyes And who shall fold her hands? Will any hearken if she cries Up to the unknown lands?
Painting of Elizabeth Siddal by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Pre-Raphaelite paintings are not just relics of Victorian art; they are invitations.
Invitations to look closely.
To honor complexity.
Celebrate individuality.
Resist the flattening pace of modern life.
Allow beauty to be something lived rather than pursued.
More than a century later, they still teach us this:
Beauty is not what you perfect. Beauty is what you notice, what you create, and what you dare to see. Both in the world and within yourself.
Introducing kids to Victorian art isn’t about lectures or timelines; it’s about opening a window into a world where stories glow in color, details brim with meaning, and imagination runs gloriously wild.
Ultimately, Victorian art, especially the works of the Pre-Raphaelites, offers exactly the kind of visual richness children instinctively respond to. It’s theatrical and emotional. Art of the 19th Century is filled with hidden objects, dramatic gestures, fairy tale settings, animals, flowers, myths, and expressive faces. In other words: it’s perfect for kids.
Here are a few ways to share the magic with them.
Start With the Stories
Miranda by John William Waterhouse is based on Shakespeare’s play The Tempest.
Victorian art is steeped in storytelling. There’s no need to begin with technical art terms. Start with the narrative.
Ask questions like:
“What do you think is happening here?”
“Who do you think this person is?”
“What do you see first?”
“What would happen next if this painting were a book?”
Works like Millais’ Ophelia, Rossetti’sThe Day-Dream, Holman Hunt’sThe Lady of Shalott, and Waterhouse’s The Soul of the Rose are just a few examples of works that instantly invite storytelling. Children naturally fill in the gaps.
Victorian painters adored literature and tales of fairy tales, medieval romances, Shakespeare, Tennyson. Children adore stories, too. This is your bridge.
The Day-Dream, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Notice the Details (Victorian Artists Loved Them)
Pia de Tolomei, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1868).
Victorian artists painted like detectives: every blossom, book, feather, gesture, and ray of light meant something.
Encourage your kids to:
Describe any jewelry or interesting items, such as furniture
Spot animals, insects, or flowers
Count objects
Search for symbols
Notice clothing or expression changes
Turn a painting into a treasure hunt. Suddenly, Victorian art becomes interactive rather than dusty.
Connect Art to Nature
The Blind Girl, Sir John Everett Millais
The Victorians, especially the Pre-Raphaelites, were obsessed with nature. They painted outdoors, studied plants, and described leaves and flowers with botanical accuracy.
Bring art into the physical world:
Go on a nature walk and find leaves that match the paintings
Bring a book of flowers and identify what’s in Ophelia’s hands
Compare real petals to Waterhouse’s roses
Sketch outside like Millais or Rossetti
Collect and press flowers in a book
Art becomes less like a museum label and more like a living, breathing world they can step into.
Encourage Them to Make Their Own Victorian Inspired Art
The Little Foot Page, Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale
Children should experience the art in their hands, not just their eyes.
Ideas:
Paint or draw using muted Victorian palettes (moss green, rose, gold, sky blue)
Create a portrait of a favorite toy “Victorian style”
Illustrate their own myth or fairy tale
Make a paper crown for a Pre-Raphaelite hero or heroine
Try watercolors to capture “dreamy” soft light
Copy a tiny corner of a larger painting
Art becomes play… and play becomes understanding.
Use Children’s Books and Kid-Friendly Resources
An iconic Victorian book illustration: The White Rabbit, John Tenniel, Alice in Wonderland
Victorian art pairs beautifully with:
Illustrated storybooks
Mythology or fairy-tale collections
Short bios of artists
Kid-friendly museum guides
Graphic novel versions of classics
If your child enjoys Greek myths or fairy tales, Victorian art’s interpretations of those stories will feel like natural extensions.
Visit a Museum (or Create a “Home Museum”)
Children thrive when art is an experience
At a museum:
Visit one or two Victorian paintings, not twenty
Spend time with a single artwork and talk about it
Encourage them to find “their favorite detail”
Bring a notebook and let them sketch quietly
At home:
Print a few paintings and hang them at kid-eye level. Or use postcards; there are so many gorgeous postcards of paintings available online.
Make a rotating “gallery wall”
Have a weekly “choose a painting” ritual
Use the prints as inspiration for bedtime stories. You can take turns making up your own stories about paintings, no doubt your children can thrill you with their own imaginative tales!
Victorian art becomes familiar, comforting, and part of the daily fabric of life.
Talk About Feelings, Not Facts
The Vale of Rest, Sir John Everett Millais
Children don’t need dates or movements, that can come later, if they want. Right now, they need connection.
Ask:
“How does this picture make you feel?”
“What do you think she’s thinking?”
“Does this scene look calm? Sad? Exciting?”
“Which character would you be?”
Victorian artists loved depicting emotions such as longing, courage, frustration, hope, curiosity, enchantment. Children instinctively read these expressions and respond with honesty.
Let the Art Be a Conversation Starter
Victorian art opens gentle doors to big topics:
Why do people tell stories?
Why do artists make things beautiful?
What makes a hero?
What is imagination?
Why do we look at art at all?
Art is a safe, effective way of talking about life. Go for it!
Introducing your children to Victorian art isn’t about building mini art historians (unless that’s what they want!), it’s about giving them a set of eyes that notice beauty, pattern, emotion, and story. The Victorians believed art should enrich the spirit, awaken empathy, and spark the imagination and that’s a perfect recipe to capture your child’s wonder!
As I pursue the Pre-Raphaelites, I find it is the small details that captivate me, pulling me further and further down the rabbit hole. One tiny detail that delighted me recently is this glimpse of what’s on the mantle in Burne-Jones’ sitting room.
Photograph by Frederick Hollyer of the sitting room at The Grange, North End Lane, Fulham.
The photo above was taken by photographer Frederick Hollyer, who recorded several Pre-Raphaelite artists and a wide assortment of notable Victorian figures. In The Last Pre-Raphaelite, biographer Fiona MacCarthy identifies the painting seen above the fireplace as W.B. Richmond’s portrait of Burne-Jones’ daughter Margaret, and she also notes casts of Michelangelo’s Night and Dawn sitting on the mantelpiece.
It was Michelangelo that caught my attention. The mention of the name stirred up vague memories of reading Burne-Jones’ comments about the Old Master during his youthful visits to Italy, crucial visits that had an impact on his development as an artist. I began to search for images of Michelangelo’s original Night and Dawn. I needed a closer look.
Thus, my descent into the rabbit hole began.
Night, MichelangeloDawn, Michelangelo
Searching for Night and Dawn was itself a compelling journey, and to chronicle that would take up too much space here. I will say that their home, the Medici Chapel, is a fascinating place to read about, and I could look at pictures of its interior for hours. This unlikely article in the New England Journal of Medicine raises the possibility that the woman depicted in Michelangelo’s sculpture of Night exhibited symptoms of breast cancer.
SmartHistory has an interesting video introduction discussing the Medici Chapel.
Burne-Jones evidently felt strongly about Michelangelo. His wife Georgiana records in Memorials of Burne-Jones that a disagreement about the artist created a serious division between Burne-Jones and art critic John Ruskin, a close friend. “Ten years after the evening at Denmark Hill when the thing happened, Edward said of Ruskin’s lecture on Michelangelo: ‘He read it to me just after he had written it and, as I went home I wanted to drown myself in the Surrey Canal or get drunk in a tavern — it didn’t seem worth while to strive any more if he could think it and write it.’”
(I’m purposely not going to share what Ruskin wrote that so irritated Burne-Jones, because I want to give you the chance to go down your own rabbit hole.)
Georgiana also wrote that on his visit to the Sistine Chapel, her husband had a unique way of appreciating Michelangelo’s work on the magnificent ceiling:
“In the Sistine Chapel he was made happy by finding the ruin of the frescoes, as well as well as their obscurity, much exaggerated by report. So he bought the best opera-glass he could find, folded his railway rug thickly, and, lying down on his back, read the ceiling from beginning to end, peering into every corner and revelling in its execution.” (Memorials of Burne-Jones, vol. II)
Fiona MacCarthy writes about his visit to Michelangelo’s Casa Buonarroti in her excellent biography, The Last Pre-Raphaelite:
“Back in Florence Burne-Jones fitted in an aficionado’s visit to the house of Michelangelo, which had only opened since 1858. Here, in a small room, he saw the artist’s walking sticks, his slippers and his writing table, in another room his papers, poems and letters. Burne-Jones carefully examined the wax and clay models, a relief in marble, wonderful drawings and studies, frustrated that nothing had been photographed. If only he could have kept some visual records. ‘It is’, he notes, ‘a quiet beautiful house and one can realize the life in it.’ Before he left Florence he returned to Santa Maria Novella, to his favorite ‘green cloister’. In Genoa he drew the orange trees, the olive trees, the nearby hill towns, making studies of the local architecture in a frenzy of departure from beloved Italy.” (MacCarthy, Fiona. The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination. Faber and Faber 2011)
In a letter Burne-Jones wrote to the daughter of a friend, he listed sights she should see on her own Italian journey. He urged her to “go to the house of Michelangelo and kiss his slippers, as I did.”
Photograph of Edward Burne-Jones by Frederick Hollyer
When Burne-Jones traveled, he kept notebooks where he sketched and chronicled his impressions. It occurs to me that jotting in the notebook, gazing at Michelangelo’s work through opera glasses, and his visit to the artist’s home are all evidence of Burne-Jones’ own rabbit hole.
I was interested in finding anything Burne-Jones had to say about Michelangelo and was especially hoping to perhaps find a mention of the copies of Night and Dawn. I read all the instances of Michelangelo’s name appearing in Memorials of Burne-Jones and when I came to the bit on page 257, something felt palpably different. I needed to go back a few pages to experience the full context. The chapter is filled with his friendship and conversation with Dr. Sebastian Evans, a journalist and political activist. Part of their conversation grabbed me instantly:
“There are lots of people who have no ‘call’ at all. They don’t count –they are no more fools than they are wise for not having it. The real fool is the man who hears the call and doesn’t obey it. To do any real good, you must work to the best advantage. What you have to do is express yourself — utter yourself, turn out what is in you — on the side of beauty and right and truth, and of course you can’t turn out your best unless you know what your best is. You, for instance, start a rag of a newspaper — I cover an acre of canvas with the dream of the deathbed of a king who you tell me was never alive — why? Simply because for the life of us we can’t hit on any more healing ointment for the maladies of this poor old woman, the world at large. Our religion is the same. There is only one religion. ‘Make the most of your best’ is common sense and morals.” (Memorials of Burne-Jones, vol. II)
I was moved by the depth and simplicity of Burne-Jones’ thought. Heed your call in life, whatever it may be, and do your very best. Do your best to give to the world what you feel called to do. And why should we do that? Because this is how we heal those around us and, if our work lasts like Michelangelo’s and Burne-Jones’, those who come after us.
One person cannot heal the world, but collectively we make the world a better place if we view our skills and talents not only as gifts we’ve been given, but also gifts we generously present to the world.
In the same passage, he goes on the share his feelings on the Biblical concept of the Day of Judgment:
“Day of Judgment? It is a synonym for the present moment — it is eternally going on. It is not so much as a moment — it is just the line that has no breadth between past and future. There is not, cannot be, if you think it out — any other Day of Judgment. It is not in the ‘nature of things’. The Dies irae dies illa is everlastingly dissolving the ages into ashes everywhere. It is nature herself, natura, not past or future, but the eternal being born, the sum of things as they are, not as they have been or will be. What I am driving at is this: We are a living part, however small, of things as they are. If we believe that things as they are can be made better than they are, and in that faith set to work to help the betterment to the best of our ability however limited, we are, and cannot help being, children of the Kingdom. If we disbelieve in the possibility of betterment, or don’t try to help it forward, we are and cannot help being damned. It is the ‘things as they are’ that is the touchstone — the trial — the Day of Judgment. ‘How do things as they are strike you?’ The question is as bald as an egg, but it is the egg out of which blessedness or unblessedness is everlastingly being hatched for every living soul. “
Burne-Jones’ idea moved me. What his passage makes me think is that we often go through our lives as if our daily actions culminate in something big that will happen in the far away and shadowy future or, like the Day of Judgment, at the very end of our days.
But what if we viewed this Day of Judgment as Burne-Jones did? For him it was not a dramatic ending where it was decided if we should be heaven-bound or damned, but every moment of our lives. Every single moment. And the outcome of the moment can be summed up by asking the simple question, “Did I make things better or worse?” Perhaps a follow up question could be added, based on his earlier statement: “Did I do my best?”
I read the passage again that brought me to Burne-Jones’ exchange in the first place: Michelangelo.
“‘Have you faith, my dear? Do you ever think of this poor old woman, our Mother, trudging on and on towards nothing and nowhere, and swear by all your gods that she shall yet go gloriously some day, with sunshine and flowers and chanting of her children that love has and she loves? I can never think of collective humanity as brethren and sisters; they seem to me ‘Mother’ — more nearly Mother than Mother Nature herself. To me, this weary, toiling, groaning world of men and women is none other than Our Lady of Sorrows. It lies on you and me and all the faithful to make her Our Lady of the Glories. Will she ever be so? Will she? Will she? She shall be, if your toil and mine, and the toil of a thousand ages of them that come after us can make her so!’”
“Afterwards he said: ‘That was an awful thought of Ruskin’s, that artists paint God for the world. There’s a lump of greasy pigment at the end of Michael Angelo’s hog-bristle brush, and by the time it has been laid on stucco, there is something there that all men with eyes recognize as divine. Think of what it means. It is the power of bringing God into the world — making God manifest. It is giving back her Child that was crucified to Our Lady of the Sorrows.’”
Burne-Jones speaks of the world collectively as “Mother” and “Our Lady of the Sorrows” and the thought of that brings to my mind the idea of a constant and everlasting exchange. Mother nurtures, we should nurture her in return. I believe he is suggesting we do this by following our calling, doing our best, and actively contributing to making things better.
‘Earth Mother’, Sir Edward Burne-Jones
I read these passages more than once. I pondered them. I transcribed them. I felt energized and grateful for them.
A realization dawned on me: I was just looking for two statues. Two beautiful inanimate objects on a mantle. That’s all I was looking for, and it led me to glorious ideas about the world and our place in it.
What a gift.
A rabbit hole isn’t the bottomless pit of interest I always assumed it to be. I love using the phrase “rabbit hole,” because for me it conjures up both Alice in Wonderland imagery and falling into a consuming passion that feeds my brain and my soul. Yet it is not just falling blindly into a hole, it is diving wholeheartedly into a journey. Do we know where that initial dive will lead or how the journey will end? That mystery contributes to the delight of the rabbit hole itself.
I have spent a lifetime burrowing down an assortment of rabbit holes, but I only just realized that the seemingly insignificant details that start a journey are never small in the end. They’re the dots that make up a dot-to-dot drawing.
I saw a photograph of Burne-Jones’ sitting room and I spied with my little eye two Michelangelo creations. That dot led to Burne-Jones’ journeys through Italy, the home and work of Michelangelo, and a conversation that spoke to me in a way that I have not clearly defined, if I ever choose to define it at all.
In writing that last sentence, I just realized the true beauty and purpose of a rabbit hole. You think it leads away from you; you are pursuing something interesting that exists outside of yourself. Then it leads right back to you and pierces your heart and there you are, no longer a happy prisoner of just any old rabbit hole, but the keeper of the keys, the carrier of the rabbit hole and the caretaker of the lessons you have learned there.
