The P.R.B. was completed by the accession of three members to the
four already mentioned. These were James Collinson, a domestic
painter; Frederic George Stephens, an Academy-student of painting;
and myself, a Government-clerk. These again, when the P.R.B. was
formed towards September 1848, were all young, aged respectively
about twenty-three, twenty-one, and nineteen.

This Praeraphaelite Brotherhood was the independent creation of
Holman-Hunt, Millais, Rossetti, and (in perhaps a somewhat minor
degree) Woolner: it cannot be said that they were prompted or abetted
by any one. Ruskin, whose name has been sometimes inaccurately mixed
up in the matter, and who had as yet published only the first two
volumes of "Modern Painters," was wholly unknown to them personally,
and in his writings was probably known only to Holman-Hunt. Ford
Madox Brown had been an intimate of Rossetti since March 1848, and he
sympathized, fully as much as any of these younger men, with some
old-world developments of art preceding its ripeness or
over-ripeness: but he had no inclination to join any organization for
protest and reform, and he followed his own course--more influenced,
for four or five years ensuing, by what the P.R.B.'s were doing than
influencing them. Among the persons who were most intimate with the
members of the Brotherhood towards the date of its formation, and
onwards till the inception of "The Germ," I may mention the
following. For Holman-Hunt, the sculptor John Lucas Tupper, who had
been a fellow Academy-student, and was now an anatomical designer at
Guy's Hospital: he and his family were equally well acquainted with
Mr. Stephens. For Millais, the painter Charles Allston Collins, son
of the well-known painter of domestic life and coast-scenes
William Collins; the painter Arthur Hughes; also his own brother,