VISITORS to The Bowes Museum can imagine what life would have been like in a world full of myths and legends at its spring exhibition.

Pre-Raphaelite Knights: Reinventing the Medieval World includes 18 paintings loaned by prestigious public collections including the Tate, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, Guildhall Art Gallery, The Fitzwilliam Museum and Manchester Art Gallery, featuring the leading lights in the Pre-Raphaelite movement – a secret brotherhood of painters, writers and poets founded in 1848 – John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Sir Edward Burne-Jones and William Holman Hunt.

It will also feature suits of armour from Glamis Castle in Scotland, illustrated editions of The Book of The Order of Chivalry and The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems by William Morris and an illustrated edition of Alfred Tennyson’s poem Idylls of the King, on loan from Lincolnshire Archives.

Dr Howard Coutts, curator at The Bowes Museum, said: “This exhibition is a celebration of how the Victorians imagined the Medieval period to be and the works on show highlight their reinterpretation of it, with beautiful fanciful images of romance and heroism. It’s also lovely that one of the paintings is returning to the Museum almost 100 years to the day it was last loaned here, The Knight Errant by John Everett Millais from the Tate.”

Visitors can also try to recreate a jigsaw of museum’s stained glass window of a boy saint in armour on a light box.

The exhibition is being supported by The Albert Dawson Educational Trust.

The exhibition will run from February 1 to May 3.