A toucan in a cowboy hat riding a llama around the dining table, a wombat asleep among the silver, and a master of the house who paid men to dig up his wife's grave at Highgate Cemetery to retrieve the poems he had buried with her. This episode gets inside the head of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the painter-poet who co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 and reshaped British art before his romantic ideals and addictions consumed him.

We cover his bohemian upbringing among Italian exiles, his rebellion against the Royal Academy's Raphael-based formulas, the wet white ground technique that made Pre-Raphaelite canvases glow like stained glass, the critical savaging that drove him from public exhibition, his toxic decade with Elizabeth Siddal and her laudanum death in 1862, the Chelsea menagerie on Cheyne Walk, the shift to dense sensual ...