* * * * *

Contemporary with these last-named artists were the Pre-raphaelites. The
centre of this school was called the Brotherhood, which was founded by J.
E. Millais, W. Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Michael
Rossetti. To these were added Thomas Woolner the sculptor, James Collins,
and F. G. Stephens. Other important artists known as Pre-raphaelites, not
belonging to the Brotherhood, are Ford Madox Brown and Burne Jones, as
well as the water-color painters, Mason, Walker, Boyce, and Goodwin.

The aim of these artists was to represent with sincerity what they saw,
and the simple sincerity of painters who preceded Raphael led them to
choose a name which Ruskin called unfortunate, "because the principles
on which its members are working are neither pre- nor post-Raphaelite,
but everlasting. They are endeavoring to paint with the highest possible
degree of completion what they see in nature, without reference to
conventional established rules; but by no means to imitate the style of
any past epoch. To paint Nature--Nature as it was around them, by the
help of modern science, was the aim of the Brotherhood."

At the time when the Pre-raphaelite School came into being the art of
other lands as well as that of England was in need of an awakening
impulse, and the Pre-raphaelite revolt against conventionality and the
machine-like art of the period roused such interest, criticism, and
opposition as to stimulate English art to new effort, and much of its
progress in the last half-century is doubtless due to the discussions of
the theories of this movement as well as of the works it produced.

Pre-raphaelitism, scorned and ridiculed in its beginning, came to be
appreciated in a degree that at first seemed impossible, and though its