ABSTRACT
Rossetti, working under Ford Madox Brown and Hunt, certainly had something from both, but he repaid it, to Hunt's advantage rather than Brown's. Look at that most admirable design by Hunt, The Lady of Shalott, in the Tennyson these and other artists illustrated. It is almost wholly Rossetti. But in the genius of Brown, and the most distinctive quality in it, there was something of an honest surliness, a wholesome glowering appreciation of what is knotty, harsh and grotesque in the human comedy. So far as Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites reacted on Brown, they drew him, luckily not very far, towards an art in which that had little scope. All that, however, was in the future. In 1848 Rossetti, Holman Hunt, Millais, Woolner were very young men, the oldest twenty-three, the youngest nineteen, and they came together at the Royal Academy Schools in a discontent with contemporary painting strong enough to hide from them the unlikelihood of permanent agreement.
