Does Andrew Lloyd Webber believe Sarah Brightman is a reincarnation of his beloved  Pre-Raphaelite "It" Girl?

Andrew Lloyd Webber will never forget the first moment he saw the face of Jane Morris. He cannot recall how old he was but he thinks he was about 14. It was in a picture book of Pre-Raphaelite artists. To this day he can't quite put his finger on the beauty that haunts him but he knows he is not alone in recognising that Jane Morris is bewitching both men and women today in a way she did when she first appeared on the social scene more than 100 years ago.

Jane Morris is the real-life muse that Rossetti, one of the founding fathers of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, painted over and over again. She appears as a series of different goddesses from Prosephine to Mariana and Venus, goddess of love - but it is always Jane Morris the viewer sees, and her image is drawing vast crowds even today.

There are nine oils and drawings of Jane Morris in the current exhibition of Lloyd Webber's stunning private Pre-Raphaelite collection at the Royal Academy. Some are huge, with massive gilded frames and dominating entire walls. Little wonder then that whatever else Lord Leighton, Burne-Jones and Millais created, Jane Morris is the defining face of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Her face also beams out from the walls of the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, where Rossetti's works are on show.

As the public flock to these galleries the response is nearly always the same: 'What an amazing face. What an amazing woman. What amazing hair and extraordinary eyes.' And then comes the killer question: 'I wonder who she was?'

It is a question that has obsessed Andrew Lloyd Webber since the moment he first caught sight of Rossetti’s haunting images. So much so that some have remarked on how the artist's great muse bears an extraordinary physical resemblance to the Pre-Raphaelite looks of Sarah Bright-man, Lloyd Webber's second wife.

'Rossetti's portraits are just the iconic images of the Pre-Raphaelite era,' he said last week. 'She was "it" for Rossetti. It is very strange that to this day she exerts a strange fascination. She is nothing short of mesmeric.

'She is quite extraordinary and there is something almost contemporary about her looks. An awful lot of women nowadays identify with that ideal of beauty, which explains why she is appealing to both men and women.'

Close friends of the multi-millionaire composer go as far as to suggest that when he first saw Sarah he thought he had found the living incarnation of Jane Morris. It may sound fanciful but perhaps it is not without foundation. Lloyd Webber understandably declines to respond to this theory.

When he discovered 22-year-old Sarah Brightman back in 1983, she was a member of the sexually charged dance troupe Hot Gossip. Like Jane Morris, her cascading dark locks, blue-grey eyes and voluptuous curves mixed vitality with sensual beauty. Lloyd Webber was entranced – and just as he had to own Jane Morris, he had to own Brightman. Within months, he had divorced his wife, the mother of his two children, to marry her.

Jane Morris's own route to fame was equally remarkable. It was a chance encounter at a theatre in Oxford in 1857 which marked a dramatic change in her fortunes. As Jane Burden, an impoverished 17-year-old, she took her place in the cheap seats blissfully unaware she was being watched by two strangers in the stalls. One was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the other was his protégé, the artist Edward Burne-Jones.

Both men were hoping to find young, beautiful women who would model for them. Rossetti was immediately transfixed by the tall, dark-haired figure with her full, deep red lips, wild, unkempt hair and bushy eyebrows, and knew at once he had found his muse. He rushed outside after the performance and begged Jane to sit for him.

In spite of his long-term engagement to his previous muse, Lizzie Siddal, Rossetti embarked on a passionate affair with Jane, soon placing her at the epicenter of Oxford's bohemian artistic circle.

One could, in moments of fleeting lucidity, imagine that Lloyd Webber might see himself as Rossetti to Brightman's Jane Morris. Sarah was virtually unknown before he began his affair with her. Today she is incredibly rich, not simply from her £6 million divorce settlement but from the vast amounts she earns from concerts in both America and Germany, where she can command $1 million a show. The profile that Brightman was given by Lloyd Webber has enabled her to become rich and famous and to project her own innate talent and beauty.

And it was the same with Jane Morris. She, too, was unknown, but through the company of rich and famous men she acquired great wealth and social position. Rossetti was not the only man in awe of her beauty. His brother William wrote: 'Her face was at once tragic, mystic, passionate, calm, beautiful and gracious - a face for a sculptor, and a face for a painter - a face solitary in England ... Her' eyes a deep penetrating grey, her massive wealth of hair gorgeously rippled and tending to black, yet not without some deep sunken glow.'

But despite their passion and intensity, both relationships were not to last. After a seven-year marriage, Lloyd Webber left Brightman for 27-year-old equestrian star Madeleine Gurdon - who is now his current wife.

Rossetti, meanwhile, suddenly returned to his fiancée in Derbyshire, leaving Jane to fend for herself. By this time she had come to the attention of Rossetti's friend, the painter and artist William Morris. Soon she was rewarded with a proposal of marriage, and as he was worth more than £900 a year - a considerable sum at that time - she was in no position refuse.

Yet even marriage could not stop other men lusting after her. The Algernon Swinburne said: 'The of his marrying her is insane – to kiss her feet is the utmost men should dream of doing.'

The obsession with Jane Morris continues to this day, as Lloyd Webber himself will testify. Even he counts his portraits of Jane as some of the jewels in his considerable private collection. Indeed, the composer is so proud of the paintings of Jane that he cannot resist showing her off to visitors at his London home in Belgravia.

'She has something about her such radiance - with those incredible eyes. She really was the most important muse for Rossetti. It was in his paintings of her that Rossetti produce best work,' he says.

Some would say Brightman's influence had a similar effect on Lloyd Webber. Her smouldering looks and angelic voice inspired him to write arguably his greatest musical, Phantom Of The Opera.

Phantom, which had its world premiere at Her Majesty's Theatre London in 1986, is the epitome of a Lloyd Webber production, built around the drama of impossible love and Esmerelda, the impossible woman.

Lloyd Webber has always been fascinated by the challenge of unattainable women and his ability to transform women beyond their wildest dreams. Rossetti, too, gained immense satisfaction from plucking young women from obscurity and propelling them to stardom.

In less than a year he had transformed Jane from scullery maid to society lady before she went on to marry Morris in 1859. Her sex life with Morris was both unsatisfying and awkward, but she bore him two children.

It came as little surprise that after Rossetti's wife died of an overdose, Jane set her sights once again on the great master - and restarted their affair. In the summer of 1865 she went to Rossetti's home in Cheyne Walk to model for an 'artistic' photographic session, photos which were then used for Rossetti's most sexually suggestive paintings - the ones which are now in Andrew Lloyd Webber's collection.

Rossetti portrayed her as Venus Verticordia, the goddess of love, and wrote explicit sonnets in praise of her. 'Beauty like hers is genius,' he wrote.

It is a beauty, with all its suggestive qualities, which resonates still. As Andrew Lloyd Webber explains: 'I remember going to the mall at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas to see a huge blow-up of Jane's face on one wall. When I asked why the Americans, who know nothing about the Pre-Raphaelites, would have a picture of Jane Morris in Vegas, I was told that her image is the top-selling greetings card in Vegas.'

The composer told Melvyn Bragg on The South Bank Show that his wish is that after his death, his entire collection including the Rossetti works is put on show to the public, possibly on a site near his country house, Sydmonton in Oxfordshire.

In a similar vein, Rossetti himself was keen to immortalise Jane Morris both in his poetry and his painting. In a tellingly prophetic act, when Rossetti painted her as Mrs William Morris In A Blue Dress he wrote an inscription which said: Tamed by her poet husband and surpassingly famous for her beauty, let her gain lasting fame by my painting.'

Morris certainly never countenanced divorce but allowed the affair to continue, even taking out a joint lease on Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire so the pair could continue their liaison away from the prying eyes of London's gossips. However, the relationship was doomed to failure: fear of scandal and of becoming social outcasts put an intolerable strain on both Jane and Rossetti.

In 1871 Rossetti fell ill with alarming symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. He attempted suicide and thereafter was constantly under sedation, never really recovering before his death in 1882. Jane feigned ill health, meaning she could be absolved from her duties as Mrs. William Morris the hostess. Instead, she became a 'sofa-woman' at the tender age of 29, spending the majority of her time in a reclining pose on the chaise longue.

On one occasion, as Jane lay on the sofa and Morris read his poems aloud, they were visited by the novelist Henry James. He wrote: 'It's hard to say whether she's a grand synthesis of all Pre-Raphaelite pictures ever made - or they a 'keen analysis' of her - whether she's an original or a copy. In either case, she is a wonder.'

And she still exerts an astonishing influence. At the opening party for the exhibition, Bob Geldof said of Lloyd Webber's collection and his obsession with Jane Morris: 'It's as obsessive as any of the Pre-Raphaelites themselves. It's not even a labour of love -it's a labour of madness.'

Undoubtedly Jane Morris's beauty drove Rossetti to the mental abyss into which he fell. How extraordinary that, 100 years later, another high-profile figure is haunted by her extraordinary looks. Perhaps we now know one of the reasons why.