A few days later, he presented himself at Rossetti’s home. “I was told,” recalls the poet, “that a man was asking to see me. This man wanted neither to come in nor to give his name, and was waiting in the corridor. So I went down to see him, and when I arrived at the bottom of the stairs I found Brown holding a large stick in one hand and waving my letter about in the other. Instead of greeting me, he cried out: ‘Is your name Rossetti and was it you who wrote this?’ I responded in the affirmative, but I was shaking in my boots. ‘What is the meaning of this letter?’ he asked, and when I replied that I meant exactly what I had said, that I wanted to be a painter and had no idea what I should to do become one, Brown began to realise that the letter was not a mockery but a sincere homage, and he immediately changed from a mortal enemy into the gentlest of friends.”[4] This young man, who appeared so unexpectedly to join ranks with Madox Brown, was only twenty years old. He was the son of an Italian exile, born in the little town of Vasto d’Ammone perched in the mountains of the Abruzzo region. It was because his father, a highlander curious about civilisation, had gone down to Naples and worked for many years as a museum curator that the ideas of art and of great art had entered into his family. It was because this protector of the ancient gods was also a destroyer of modern monarchies, a poet known for his impetuous songs who so incriminated himself that in 1820 the return of the Bourbons saw him thrown onto English soil. And finally, it was because he married the sister of one of Byron’s friends, the doctor Polidori, that his children could gather from the memories, passions and grief of the family an echo of all the great patriotic pains that had unsettled the youth of that century. All of these events were perhaps necessary so that, in March 1848, the Gothic art of Madox Brown left some impression other than that of scandal or outmoded charm on an inhabitant of London. While the English remained indifferent to what would become their national art, the young Italian applauded it with enthusiasm and, thanks to the allowance granted by his grandfather Polidori, began his apprenticeship as a painter. Madox Brown, thinking that the first priority was to force this fiery spirit to conform to the rigid discipline of reality, had the future creator of Dante’s Dream work at copying tobacco boxes. Rossetti, who had gone through his academic courses without learning much, resigned himself to follow the advice that he had requested, for better or for worse. He worked impatiently, passionately, carelessly and in disorder, cleaning his palette with bits of paper that he threw on the ground and that later stuck to the boots of visitors, starting twelve paintings at once, then falling into complete prostration, weary, disgusted with everything and with himself, finishing nothing, no longer wanting to listen to anyone, and rolling on the ground letting out awful moans. Then he disappeared for a month. Madox Brown was not angered, thinking that his student had heard some voices from the heavens calling him to other work. These voices were those of the “trecentists” (thirteenth-century Italian poets) that he listened to in the libraries, as he was trying himself to create sonnets and poems.

      Frederick Sandys, Morgan-Le-Fay, 1864.

      Oil on panel, 61.8 × 43.7 cm.

      Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, Birmingham.

      John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott, c. 1894.

      Oil on canvas, 120 × 68 cm.

      Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds.

      William Holman Hunt, The Lady of Shalott, 1886–1905.

      Oil on canvas, 188 × 146 cm.

      Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT.

      Sidney Harold Meteyard, “I am half-sick of shadows”, said the Lady of Shalott, 1913.

      Oil on canvas, 76 × 114 cm.

      The Pre-Raphaelite Trust.

      He sent the fruit of his efforts to renowned poets, such as Leigh Hunt, and to others who were less well known, such as William Bell Scott, and asked them, after offering great praise for their verses, what they thought of his. He sent them manuscripts of masterpieces of grace and subtlety such as the Blessed Damozel as well as other lesser pieces under the title Songs of the Art Catholic, which made these rationalists and Protestants shudder. Then, with his half blind father he took up a discussion on the Divine Comedy that the old man had interpreted, and with his brother William Michael and his sister Christina, he gave a dissertation on the halo in the Middle Ages. Everyone in the household wrote verses.[5] No-one understood his temperament at all; that of a dilettante passionate about everything, an improviser speaking about everything at once, an anti-papist revolutionary interested in angels and saints, and a painter concerned with rhythm and rhyme. Oddly enough his prestige grew because of it. Gaunt and dark, with a foreign accent and appearance, a rounded forehead and gleaming eyes, his hair falling down to his shoulders, his beard cut in the style of a Neapolitan fisherman, careless in his dress and covered with stains, he seemed infinitely superior to the average artist to the young people studying painting at the Royal Academy. His passion for the picturesque side of things, his disdain for the discoveries of science, the continuous motion of his mind, and his mysticism crossed with a desire to sell his paintings at very high prices must have completely disconcerted even his close friends. He painted, wrote, painted again, rewrote, fell in love with his model, Miss Siddal, hesitating ten years before finally making up his mind to marry her. Then an unexpected event took this beloved woman away from him, and he threw his manuscripts, his most beautiful poems, into her coffin and refused for seven years to dig them up. Changing his mind, he went forward with an appalling and terrible ceremony, had the manuscripts that had been buried with the dead woman disinterred, and earned an excellent profit from them in pounds sterling. Finally, on his deathbed, after an entire life of complete indifference to religion spent in a milieu of freethinkers and adversaries of Romanism, he asked his appalled friends for priest, a confessor…

      While Rossetti was copying tobacco boxes in Madox Brown’s studio, one of his classmates at the Royal Academy was making desperate, superhuman efforts to create a place for himself as an independent artist and thus escape from a future in business. His name was William Holman Hunt, and he was twenty-one years of age. His father, a businessman with a small enterprise in the City, had tried everything to dissuade him from his artistic career. But never has fatherly prudence been so obstinately thwarted by destiny. At twelve years old the boy spent his time drawing instead of learning, so he was taken out of school and given a job as a clerk in an auctioneer’s office. One day Hunt’s new employer caught him hiding something in his desk, and insisted on knowing what it was.

      Walter Crane, The

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