Rossetti and his closest friends reacted powerfully against much of the contemporary taste and treatment in Victorian painting. The Victorians gave priority to history painting and had a love of sentimental or domestic subjects, animal painting, and the illustration of literary texts all treated. Art education was singularly classical and based upon drawing from plaster casts. In academic painting Raphael was the ideal and model and formed the basis for much serious work in Britain.
The work of Charles Lock Eastlake is characteristic of this, employing idealised stylised figures in the manner of Raphael.
The group around Rossetti including Millais, Hunt, and four others met in Gower Street, London, in September 1848 and were bowled over by the etchings in a book that one of them brought along to the meeting.
These were early nineteenth century engravings by Carlo Lasinio of the medieval murals in the Campo Santo at Pisa. They were amazed at the fresh vitality of the work, the directness and the drama, where perspective and classical ideals played no part.
They set out to produce a modern rendition of this gothic spirit, such as Rossetti's drawing Dante Drawing and Angel on the First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice and Millais's two lovers and a thorn bush (above). Paintings followed including Rossetti's Annuciation, Ecce Ancilla Domini! where his treatment of this traditional subject is highly unusual. He was worried that the scene looked too much like a young man in a young girl's bedroom (his sister Christina modelled for the Virgin), and he refused to send it to the Royal Academy.
Millais, bolder than Rossetti at this stage, did send his work to the Royal Academy in 1849, including Lorenzo and Isabella, in which to enhance the lifelike quality of the picture, he used as models family and friends. This was well received, but his next major work produced a violent reaction against the whole Brotherhood.
Few paintings have caused such a scandal. Many critics denounced it in the press as coarse and vulgar, treating a holy subject with no respect or decency. The most vitriolic was Charles Dickens, who though famous and powerful, launched an attack on the young Millais from the pages of his own journal Household Words.
Dickens read the picture as blasphemously life-like, but above all he saw it as part of a Roman Catholic conspiracy to re-convert Protestant Britain. The fact that they termed themselves a 'Brotherhood' made them seem very suspicious in people's eyes.
The Brotherhood was defended, however, by the most powerful voice in the art world in this period, that of John Ruskin, who saw parallels between their work and ideas he had been expressing in his critical writings. Notably that art is a serious business with religious overtones, and that close attention to natural detail was of supreme importance in art.
In contrast to the broad British public, the High Anglican printer at Oxford University Press, Thomas Combe and his wife Martha, were not disturbed by the doctrinal overtones of this painting. On the contrary they encouraged it, and many of the Pre-Raphaelite paintings in the Ashmolean Museum are the consequence of their early patronage.
Holman Hunt's Converted British Family hung near Millais's Christ and though it was not criticised so harshly was also thought to be part of the growing campaign of 'popery' in the country. Again this did not deter the Combe's who bought if from Hunt and commissioned more paintings, such as his famous The Light of the World.
Combe was very friendly with Millais, who addressed the printer as 'the Early Christian', and when he came to paint Mariana from Tennyson's poem of that name, details of the interior were taken from the Combe's house in the Press. Accuracy and authenticity was paramount, and here Millais represented elements from local stained glass windows and from Mrs Combe's personal altar in Mariana's bedroom.
The apogee of the first phase of Pre-Raphaelitism is represented by Millai's Ophelia. Lizzie Siddal, who one of the Brotherhood had 'discovered' in a miliner's shop in London, and who sat for many roles in these paintings was encouraged to lie in a bath in an antique wedding dress. The background was painted first from a stream in Ewell, Surrey, then the proliferation of flowers came from the nearby hedgerows and ditches and were depicted with botanical accuracy, and finally the figure was added. During the sessions the bath water grew cold, and Lizzie Siddal caught a bad cold. Millais's huge technical skill, however, managed to bring the whole picture together and it was very well-received at the Royal Academy in 1852. The Pre-Raphaelites had now begun to receive wide acceptance.
