20
TUESDAY
Perhaps the foremost purveyors of mainstream Victorian kink, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhooda mid-19th-century circle of painters and poetsbarely hid eroticism behind medieval and Biblical themes portrayed in their paintings of the languorous bodies of ample-tressed women. Author Jan Marsh, biographer of the Brotherhood’s models and muses, aims to prove that the women who skirted the clique’s edges weren’t simply well-coiffed stunners, but also influential collaborators and talents in their own right. In the 600-plus pages of her 1994 biography of poet Christina Rossetti, Marsh barely whispers of Rossetti’s modeling careershe posed for countless canvases by her brother Dante Gabriel and John Everett Millais, among othersfocusing instead on her creative influence, demonstrating that the Brotherhood wouldn’t have been the same without its sisters. Marsh lectures on Pre-Raphaelite women tonight at 7 p.m. at Chapters, 1512 K St. NW. Free. (202) 347-5495. (Jessica Dawson)