A piece of artwork, which is one of Cartwright Hall Art Gallery’s most important Pre-Raphaelite paintings, is going on loan to galleries on both sides of the Atlantic.

Ford Madox Brown’s ‘Wycliffe Reading the First Translation of the Bible into English’ (1847) was collected from the Bradford Council-run gallery by Tate Britain earlier this week.

It is one of 180 important works to go on display in the London gallery’s ‘Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde’ exhibition before travelling to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

The large oil painting portrays an event from the 14th Century where the scholar John Wycliffe reads the first English translation of the Latin Bible. Wycliffe reads to his patron, the Duke of Lancaster who sits with his wife and daughter and the poets Chaucer and Gower.

This painting is a favourite because of its meticulous and authentic medieval details and because of Brown’s association with the ever-popular Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which was led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais.

Ford Madox Brown is viewed as an important precursor to the Pre-Raphaelites, which constitute Britain’s first modern art movement. The artists rebelled against the art establishment of the mid-19th Century, taking inspiration from early Renaissance paintings.

The painting – which featured in a major exhibition on Ford Madox Brown earlier in the year at Manchester City Art Gallery and the Museum of Fine Art, Ghent, in Belgium – will return to Cartwright Hall in spring 2013.

‘Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde’ will be on display at Tate Britain from September 12, until January 13, 2013. For more information, visit tate.org.uk.