INTRODUCTION xlv

The Brotherhood had thus found and proclaimed its faith, and brought forth works illustrative of it, before Ruskin took up the cudgels on their behalf, and at the time when he did so he had no personal knowledge of any of them. Nor was the merit of their work at that time his own discovery. He had observed Millais’s picture in the Academy of 1850, and had not been very favourably impressed by it (see below, p. 320). William Dyce, R.A., he says, “dragged me, literally, up to the Millais picture of ‘The Carpenter’s Shop,’¹ which I had passed disdainfully, and forced me to look for its merits.”² It is therefore clear that Ruskin was not directly the inspirer of the Pre-Raphaelites.

They were, however, glad of his help, and it was at the instance of one of their number that this was invoked. The attacks of the critics on the Pre-Raphaelite pictures of 1850 had been very severe; they were penned with the express object, it would seem, of deterring purchasers. “We have great difficulty,” wrote Blackwood’s Magazine of “The Carpenter’s Shop,” by Millais, “in believing a report that this unpleasing and atrociously affected picture has found a purchaser at a high price. Another specimen from the same brush inspires rather laughter than disgust.”³ Such attacks were renewed in the notices of the following year’s Academy, when Millais showed his “Mariana,” “Return of the Dove to the Ark,” and “Woodman’s Daughter.” The Times led the way in a violent article quoted below (p. 319), declaring that such work “deserved no quarter at the hands of the public.” “Our strongest enemy,” writes Holman Hunt, “advised that the Academy, having shown our works so far, to prove how atrocious they were, could now, with the approval of the public, depart from their usual rule of leaving each picture on the walls until the end of the season, and take ours down and return them to us.” Officials of the Academy itself fanned the flame. “In the schools (as we were told) a professor referred to our works in such terms that the wavering students resorted to the very extreme course of hissing us.”⁴ Other newspapers and magazines afterwards took up the hue and cry, and such attacks were calculated to be very damaging to young artists who had as yet no powerful

¹ Notes on Some of the Principal Pictures of Sir John Everett Millais, 1886, edited by A. Gordon Crawford (pseudonym for A. G. Wise). Ruskin’s contributions to the pamphlet are reprinted in a later volume of this edition.

² See a letter to Ernest Chesneau, of December 28, 1882, in a later volume of this edition. And compare, also in a later volume, The Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism, § 16.

³ July 1850; vol. 68, p. 82. For other notices, see below, p. 320 n.

⁴ Contemporary Review, April 1886.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]