In 1848 the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was established by three young painters, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt.  The name expresses their admiration of the early Italian—­and notably the early Florentine—­religious painters, like Giotto, Ghiberti, Bellini, and Fra Angelica.  In the work of these men they found a sweetness, depth, and sincerity of devotional feeling, a self-forgetfulness and humble adherence to truth, which were absent from the sophisticated art of Raphael and his successors.  Even the imperfect command of technique in these “primitives” had a charm.  The stiffness and awkwardness of their figure painting, their defects of drawing, perspective, and light and shade, their lack of anatomical science were like the lispings of childhood or the artlessness of an old ballad.  The immediate occasion of the founding of the Brotherhood was a book of engravings which Hunt and Rossetti saw at Millais’ house, from the frescoes by Gozzoli, Orcagna, and others in the Campo Santo, at Pisa; the same frescoes, it will be remembered, which so strongly impressed Leigh Hunt and Keats.  Holman Hunt—­though apparently not his associates—­had also read with eager approval the first volume of Ruskin’s “Modern Painters,” in which the young artists of England are advised to “go to nature in all singleness of heart . . . rejecting nothing, selecting nothing.”  Pre-Raphaelitism was a practical, as “Modern Painters” was a theoretical, protest against the academic traditions which kept young artists making school copies of Raphael, instructed them that a third of the canvas should be occupied with a principal shadow, and that no two people’s heads in the picture should be turned the same way, and asked, “Where are you going to put your brown tree?”

The three original members of the group associated with themselves four others:  Thomas Woolner, the sculptor; James Collinson, a painter; F. G. Stephens, who began as an artist and ended as an art critic; and Rossetti’s brother William, who was the literary man of the movement.  Woolner was likewise a poet, and contributed to The Germ[2] his two striking pieces, “My Beautiful Lady” and “Of My Lady in Death.”  Among other artists not formally enrolled in the Brotherhood, but who worked more or less in the spirit and principles of Pre-Raphaelitism, were Ford Madox Brown, an older man, in whose studio Rossetti had, at his own request, been admitted as a student; Walter Deverell, who took Collinson’s place when the latter resigned his membership in order to study for the Roman Catholic priesthood; and Arthur Hughes.[3]

But the main importance of the Pre-Raphaelite movement to romantic literature resides in the poetry of Rossetti, and in the inspiration which this communicated to younger men, like Morris and Swinburne, and through them to other and still younger followers.  The history of English painting is no part of our subject, but Rossetti’s painting and his poetry so exactly reflect each other, that some definition or brief description of Pre-Raphaelitism seems here to be called for, ill qualified as I feel myself to give any authoritative account of the matter.[4]