Millais's powerful Lorenzo and Isabella was one of the first PR pictures to bear the initials P.R.B. It was largely well received when exhibited at the Royal Academy.
At this time Millais's principal patron was the printer at Oxford University Press, Thomas Combe and his wife Martha. They were both High Anglicans and saw the PR movement as potentially a religious one.
Encouraged by Combe Holman Hunt combined material detail with scriptural motifs, and Millais continued to paint for Combe.
Dante was the province of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose whole family, at some time in their lives wrote about or translated Dante.
was an early poem by Rossetti with an audacious view of female desire in a heavenly setting.
Elizabeth Siddal, 'discovered' by Walter Deverell in a milliner's shop where she worked, was an ideal Pre-Raphaelite model, thin and with unfashionable red hair.
She sat for several members of the Brotherhood including this picture painted for Thomas and Martha Combe with a potentially controversial religious meaning.
Her most famous appearance at this time was in Millais's Ophelia.
It was Rossetti, however, who was most moved by her, and she was soon sitting exclusively for him.
Rossetti's story 'Hand and Soul' written for the PR magazine, The Germ, was centrally concerned by the role of the female in male creativity.
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One of the first pictures in which Lizzie Siddal appeared was this episode from the Vita Nuova. Even at this early stage in their relationship it deals with discord between the sexes.
Rossetti's Giotto provides an emblem of the gender relations within the Brotherhood in these early years. Writers on the left and painters on the right sit high on the dais of fame and achievement. Beneath them passes Beatrice (modelled by Siddal). Dante watches her intently. She is necessary to him but remains outside the male sphere.
Almost all of the Pre-Raphaelite mistresses (with the exception of Millais's) were from a class beneath the Brothers themselves. Emma Hill was a model for Ford Madox Brown.
During a holiday in Scotland when Millais painted this portrait of Ruskin, he fell in love with Ruskin's wife Effie.
She then modelled for the role of the prisoner's wife in a picture full of significance for the relationship between Millais, Ruskin and Effie.
Holman Hunt's mistress worked in a nearby bar. She was poor and uneducated, and Hunt attempted to make her into an acceptable middle class wife. She modelled for The Awakening Conscience in a role close to her own in life.
Elizabeth Siddal was keen to become both painter and poet, and though she came from a lower social class than Rossetti she was intelligent and able. Her relationship with Rossetti, however, was double edged. He encouraged her work, but by refusing to marry put her in a dangerous social position. In another Dante picture Rossetti pictures Siddal and himself as Paolo and Francesca.
Christina Rossetti's poem 'In an artist's studio' provides a sharp comment on the gender relations between artist and model at this time, where she may have had her brother in mind.
