French exhibition to show Victorian Britain was not a 'nation of prudes "The artists expressed a sensual aesthetic with paintings offering a sharp contrast to the severity and moralising attitudes of the day," the exhibition's organisers wrote. Paintings are by the well-known Pre-Raphaelite painters Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John William Waterhouse, but also Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Frederic, Lord Leighton, Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones and Albert J Moore. Many were bought by wealthy British industrialists and shipbuilders - including the owner of the Titanic - from Liverpool, Birmingham and beyond. The exhibition includes British neoclassical masterpieces such as Alma-Tadema's The Roses of Heliogabalus but gives pride of place to the British beauties, often with "red hair, chiselled faces and long, graceful figures." This archetype can be seen in Rossetti's Venus Verticordia in a room dedicated to "the delights of the nude," which curator said represents the "archetype of British feminine beauty - tall with blond or red hair and above all sensuous body and skin." Another gem is Leighton's Crenaia, the Nymph of the Dargle - a pale-skinned beauty inspired by Ingre's La Source with a "typically British touch." A separate room is devoted to the British "femmes fatale" - summed up as "captivating, cruel, falsely ingenuous but a true enchantress," and often based on British literature from Shakespeare to Alfred Tennyson and George Meredith. Within this movement appeared the theme of the bewitching sorceress, captured in such works as Henry Arthur Payne's Enchanted Sea. "This is a theme that fascinated British society at the end of the 19th century and that today you can find in Harry Potter," said Miss Gerard-Powell. The exhibition comes at a time of renewed interest in British Victorian art, whose value has rocketed in recent years amid huge interest from wealthy private collectors, many from the Middle East. Miss Gerard-Powell said that at its low point after the Second World War, people were more interested in keeping the frames than the paintings of this period. "Andrew Lloyd Webber, who has the largest private collection of Victorian art, often recounts how he was unable to buy an Alma-Tadema for £50 in 1960 because his grandmother wouldn't lend him the money," said the curator. Today, she said, it would be worth around $35 million (£22 million). The exhibition comes from the private collection of Spanish telecommunications tycoon Juan Antonio Perez Simon.