xliv INTRODUCTION

Charles Collins, and Walter Deverell. Holman Hunt and Millais were fellow-students at the Royal Academy schools, and a friendship sprung up between them. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a student there also, and he greatly admired the picture of “The Eve of St. Agnes,” which Hunt had painted in 1848, and the two young artists took a studio together at 7 Gower Street; Millais was living with his parents at 87 in the same street. At Millais’s house the three were one night assembled, when they found a book of engravings of the frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa-the very frescoes which to Ruskin three years before had opened “a veritable Palestine” (Vol. IV. p. xxx.). “It was the finding of this book at this special time,” says Holman Hunt, “which caused the establishment of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Millais, Rossetti, and myself were all seeking for some sure ground, some starting-point for our art which would be secure, if it were ever so humble. As we searched through this book of engravings, we found in them, or thought we found, that freedom from corruption, pride, and disease for which we sought. ... ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ was adopted, after some discussion, as a distinctive prefix, though the word had first been used as a term of contempt by our enemies. And as we bound ourselves together, the word ‘Brotherhood’ was suggested by Rossetti as preferable to clique or association. It was in a little spirit of fun that we thus agreed that Raphael, the Prince of Painters, was the inspiring influence of the art of the day; for we saw that the practice of contemporary painters was as different from that of the master whose example they quoted, as established interest or indifference had ever made the conduct of disciples. It was instinctive prudence, however, which suggested to us that we should use the letters P. R. B., unexplained, on our pictures (after the signature), as the one mark of our union.”¹ In the following year’s Academy, 1849, the first pictures with the mystic initials were exhibited-Millais’s “Lozenzo and Isabella” (now in the Liverpool Gallery) and Hunt’s “Rienzi.” In the same year’s Rossetti’s “Girlhood of Mary Virgin” was exhibited at the Hyde Park Gallery. In 1850 Millais had at the Academy “Christ in the House of his Parents” and “Ferdinand lured by Ariel,” and Hunt, “Claudio and Isabella,” and “A Converted British Family sheltering a Missionary.” In January 1850 had appeared the first number of The Germ, the organ of the Brotherhood, its principle being declared in the preface-“to encourage and enforce an entire adherence to the simplicity of nature.”

¹ “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: a Fight for Art,” Contemporary Review, April 1886, pp. 480, 481.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]