In postwar Britain the reputation of high Victorian art fell to an all-time low, and a Pre-Raphaelite painting of Ophelia sold in 1950 for a paltry 20 pounds. Times have changed; this summer auctioneers will sell the same painting for around 2 million pounds.

The exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite paintings at Shinjuku's Yasuda Kasai Museum is a chance to rediscover the passion and poetry of this school. With over 90 works, the curators show us a good mixture of the familiar and the neglected. Besides the "fair damozels" of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Sir John Everett Millais, there are unsettling symbolist drawings from Simeon Solomon, exotic Eastern beauties from Leighton and atmospheric landscapes to broaden our view of the movement.

Originally, seven artistic souls formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. Rejecting pompous academicism, they aspired to the technical and spiritual purity of medieval Italian painting (hence their name). Although the brothers soon parted, they opened a unique path for British art. While the French avant-garde explored color theory and light, leading to Impressionism, these British artists sought elevating stories, illustrated in enamel-bright colors, in minute detail. Truth to nature was their creed, and like their colleagues in France, they painted directly from life.

"Twelve o'clock," wrote Millais in his diary one night, "Have this moment left [Hunt] in [a straw hut], cheerfully working by a lantern with some contorted apple trunks, washed with the phosphor light of a perfect moon."

Hunt was working on "The Light of the World," a picture of Christ knocking on an overgrown cottage door at night, bringing the lantern of faith to erring mankind. At first many people found it disturbing, but the powerful critic John Ruskin described it as "one of the very noblest works of sacred art ever produced." It became one of the most famous pictures of the century: In a single afternoon in Melbourne during a 1905-07 world tour, 25,000 people filed past it in awe.

The public was more shaken than stirred, however, and in the 1850s the wounded Pre-Raphaelites went in search of safer ground. They found it in poetry and romance, and gradually education gave way to decoration.

Rossetti was attacked for his sexually charged paintings of unconventional women. He withdrew into a private world of dreams. Compare his sketch of enraptured Jane Burden ("Study for Guinevere," 1857) with the enigmatic "Bower Meadow" of 1871-2.

Millais turned away from the medieval look of works like 1848's "The Death of Romeo and Juliet," to a more dashing, palatable style, such as that seen in "Stella," painted 20 years later. Fellow artists envied his talent, and criticized his emotional shallowness. These were useful attributes for a portrait painter, though, and Millais' reputation in polite society soared. Remember the charming "Bubbles" which he painted for Pears Soap? His work became the quintessence of Victorian sentiment.

If the subjects were getting safer, though, the painting was still extraordinary. Arthur Hughes' "Ophelia" glimmers like a ghost. Hughes achieves the difficult marriage of realism and mystery. From the details of the foreground, such as the scum on the pond, our eye travels to the distance. In that dusky mist, we sense a chill fate enveloping the fragile girl. The composition fits its frame, too; many artists designed the frame to go with the finished painting.

Edward Coley Burne-Jones was perhaps the greatest painter of the movement. The studies here were made for his monumental "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid" and "Perseus and the Graiae." (The finished oil paintings are in the Tate Gallery in London and the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, respectively, but are shown here in reproduction.)

Contrast the steely palette and swirling line of his later style with two paintings from the earlier period, "King Renz's Honeymoon Cabinet" from 1861 and "Cupid Delivering Psyche." The latter are in soft focus, and use the tapestry colors beloved by his friend William Morris, with whom Burne-Jones collaborated on many stained glass windows and murals.

The "Cupid" has a movement not seen in his mature style. The hushed stillness of his later paintings is extraordinary, as if the second-hand of fate has momentarily paused in its flight. His visionary paintings aroused intense admiration, and influenced many artists including the European Symbolists.

Ruskin, in his highly influential book "Modern Painters," urged landscape artists to study geology: Accuracy, he argued, required them to know how time had shaped and colored the mountains and seas. A large, impressive painting of the "Norman Archipelago" (the Channel Islands) by John Brett shows this principle at work.

Yet although the scene is astonishing in its detail, the spiritual dimension is rather flat. Look at George Heming Mason's "Landscape, Derbyshire," and the emotional temperature immediately rises: an unsentimental moorland scene at dusk, painted by an artist in love with nature.

Most of the paintings here are from the great collection of Victorian art at Manchester City Art Gallery, acquired as contemporary works when the city was the textile capital of the world. Hook celebrates the nobility of labor in "From Under the Sea," where a young family greets their father emerging from a Cornish tin mine. The colorful scenes of medieval trade by Ford Madox Brown reflect Manchester's civic pride. The grim world of Dickens' "Hard Times" or the class conflicts of Mrs. Gaskell's "North and South" were not popular subjects to decorate middle-class homes, though. No doubt people saw enough gritty reality out on the streets.

The final gallery is swimming with mermaids. Here is John William Waterhouse's masterpiece "Hylas and the Nymphs," painted in the last flowering of the movement in 1896. It reminded me of a love poem by Tennyson, favorite poet of the age:

"Now folds the lily all her sweetness up, /And slips into the bosom of the lake: /So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip /Into my bosom and be lost in me."

Those passionate Victorians: still surprising after all these years.