Conventional methods of study were distasteful to him. He decided to throw up the Academy training and wrote to a painter, not very well known at that date but whose work he admired, asking to be admitted to his studio as a pupil. The painter was Madox Brown, and young Rossetti, given his needs and mode of thought, could not have chosen a more suitable master. Madox Brown was only seven years older than Rossetti, but he had studied at Ghent, Antwerp, Paris, and Rome. He had exhibited some fine cartoons during the early forties for the decoration of the House of Lords. Among these was one that Rossetti had greatly admired at the exhibition of the competitive cartoons in Westminster Hall. It was “Harold’s body brought before William the Conqueror.” In March 1848 Rossetti entered upon his new experience and Madox Brown agreed to teach him painting, not for a fee but for the mere pleasure of meeting and training a sympathetic spirit. Rossetti did not long remain a regular attendant in the studio. He left after a few months.

On the opening day of the exhibition (May 1848), “Rossetti,” says Mr. Hunt, “came up boisterously and in loud tongue made me feel very confused by declaring that mine was the best picture of the year. The fact that it was from Keats (‘The Eve of St. Agnes’) made him extra enthusiastic, for, I think, no painter had ever before painted from that wonderful poet, who then, it may scarcely be credited, was little known.” Rossetti wished so earnestly to become more intimate with Hunt that he agreed to work with him, sharing a studio that the latter had just taken in Cleveland Street, Fitzroy Square. Here he began to paint his first composition, having hitherto done no more than studies, sketches, a number of portraits, some of which reveal excellent work. At this time his literary development was somewhat ahead of his artistic growth. He had already translated the Vita Nuova which is alone a monumental achievement, introducing wonderfully into the English the warmth of the southern language; and he had written some of his best known poems, including “The Blessed Damozel,” “My Sister’s Sleep,” “The Portrait,” a considerable portion of “Ave,” “A last Confession,” and the “Bride’s Prelude.”

Millais and Holman Hunt, whose friendship dated from the Academy Schools, found ground for sympathetic union with Rossetti in their common distaste for contemporary art. They were convinced it was necessary to abandon the conventional style of the day and return to a severe and conscientious study of nature. They were for a while uncertain as to the path to pursue. Where should they turn for precept and guidance on the line of their new-found principles? Looking through a book of engravings from the Campo Santo of Pisa one day at Millais’ house, they thought they had found there the direction they sought. Mr. Holman Hunt tells us that the foundation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was the immediate result of coming across the book at that particular time.

While Holman Hunt was painting “Rienzi swearing revenge over his brother’s corpse,” and Millais, “Lorenzo and Isabella,” Rossetti began his “Girlhood of Mary Virgin.” As can well be imagined that first composition gave him endless trouble and was the cause of the most violent fits of alternate depression and energy. But the following spring (1849), the three pictures were ready for exhibition. Millais and Hunt were hung in the Royal Academy Exhibition and Rossetti’s in the so-called Free Exhibition, which was held in a gallery at Hyde Park Corner. In the “Girlhood of Mary Virgin,” he represents a room in the Virgin’s home with a balcony on which her father, St. Joachim, is seen tending a vine which grows up towards the top of the picture. On the right, against a dark green curtain, are the figures of St. Anna and the Virgin sitting at an embroidery frame. The mother, in dark green and brown garments with a dull red head-dress, is watching with clasped hands the work in front of her. The young girl, a quite unconventional Madonna dressed in grey, pauses with a needle in her hand gazing in front of her at a child angel holding a white lily. Underneath the pot in which the white lily grows are six big books bearing the names of the six cardinal virtues. The figures, as well as the dove which is perched on the trellis, bear halos, their names being inscribed within. Rossetti painted his mother for St. Anna and his sister Christina for the Virgin. Changing her dark brown hair to golden, he broke a rule of the[23]
[24]
[25] Brotherhood, which decrees that the artist shall copy his model most scrupulously. The picture was signed with his name, followed by the three letters P.R.B. Rossetti having revealed the meaning of these three letters to a friend it was soon generally known and no peace was given to those who dared to stand up against traditional authority. It is necessary to explain that, at that time, Raphael was considered the greatest of all painters. All who came before him were ignored and a set of fixed rules supposed to have been deduced from his work was taught in all the schools. The revolt of the “Brethren” was directed much more against those rules than against Raphael’s work which, in all probability, they hardly knew.

At about the same time that he painted “Mary’s Girlhood,” Rossetti did a portrait in oils of his father, his first work of this kind. He also drew an outline design of a lute player and his lady, a subject taken from Coleridge’s “Genevieve”; a pen-and-ink drawing of “Gretchen in the Chapel,” with Mephistopheles whispering in her ear, and “The Sun may shine and we be cold,” a sketch of a girl near a window, apparently a prisoner. To this period also belongs the important pen-and-ink drawing, “Il Saluto di Beatrice,” representing in two parts the meeting of Dante and Beatrice, first in a street of Florence and secondly in Paradise.

The most important of Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite work during the two years following 1848 is the “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” quite in keeping in sentiment with the picture of the previous year. Both these pictures are a little timid in treatment. In the “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” the Virgin clad in white is sitting on her bed, as if just awakened, and sees with awe the full length of an angel, also clad in white, floating in front of her and holding a white lily in his hand. The