Upcoming Events
Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Poetry | 17 October 2026 – 13 February 2027 | admission charges apply
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 fine and 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 | admission charges apply
The Laing Art Gallery will show the National Portrait Gallery’s celebrated painting competition, the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award, which is returning for 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 includes 46 portraits selected for display by a panel of judges and explores themes of cultural heritage, companionship, sexuality, illness, conflict, and grief. This includes a striking self-portrait by artist Moira Cameron, who has been named the winner. Michelle Liu has won the Young Artist Award for her portrait, Kofi. Other awards include the second prize for Cliff, Outreach Worker by Tim Benson and third prize for 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 | free entry
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 | continues until 28 February 2026 | admission charges apply
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.
Find out more about Laing Art Gallery and to plan your journey here.
