And first as to methods:  the Pre-Raphaelites rejected the academic system whereby the canvas was prepared by rubbing in bitumen, and the colours were laid upon a background of brown, grey, or neutral tints.  Instead of this, they spread their colours directly upon the white, unprepared canvas, securing transparency by juxtaposition rather than by overlaying.  They painted their pictures bit by bit, as in frescoes or mosaic work, finishing each portion as they went along, until no part of the canvas was left blank.  The Pre-Raphaelite theory was sternly realistic.  They were not to copy from the antique, but from nature.  For landscape background, they were to take their easels out of doors.  In figure painting they were to work, if possible, from a living model and not from a lay figure.  A model once selected, it was to be painted as it was in each particular, and without imaginative deviation.  “Every Pre-Raphaelite landscape background,” wrote Ruskin, “is painted, to the last touch, in the open air from the thing itself.  Every Pre-Raphaelite figure, however studied in expression, is a true portrait of some living person.  Every minute accessory is painted in the same manner.” [5] In this fashion their earliest works were executed.  In Rossetti’s “Girlhood of Mary Virgin,” exhibited in 1849, the figure of St. Anne is a portrait of the artist’s mother; the Virgin, of his sister Christina; and Joseph, of a man-of-all-work employed in the family.  In Millais’ “Lorenzo and Isabella”—­a subject from Keats—­Isabella’s brother, her lover, and one of the guests, are portraits of Deverell, Stephens, and the two Rossettis.  But this severity of realism was not long maintained.  It was a discipline, not a final method.  Even in Rossetti’s second painting, “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” the faces of the Virgin and the angel Gabriel are blendings of several models; although, in its freedom from convention, its austere simplicity, and endeavour to see the fact as it happened, the piece is in the purest Pre-Raphaelite spirit.  Ruskin insisted that, while composition was necessarily an affair of the imagination, the figures and accessories of a picture should be copies from the life.  In the early days of the Brotherhood there was an ostentatious conscientiousness in observing this rule.  We hear a great deal in Rossetti’s correspondence about the brick wall at Chiswick which he copied into his picture “Found,” and about his anxious search for a white calf for the countryman’s cart in the same composition.  But all the Pre-Raphaelites painted from the lay figure as well as from the living model, and Rossetti, in particular, relied quite as much on memory and imagination as upon the object before him.  W. B. Scott thinks that his most charming works were the small water-colours on Arthurian subjects; “done entirely without nature and a good deal in the spirit of illuminated manuscripts, with very indifferent drawing and perspective nowhere.”  As for Millais, he soon departed from rigidly Pre-Raphaelite