The aim set forth in this declaration is not the aim of any school, however distinguished, but the aim, conscious or unconscious, of all great painters. It has been constantly pursued throughout the life of him who wrote these words; if we did not put this first, we should err.

The secondary purpose of his work—to give England what she has never had before, a school of artists of her own—of vast and infinite grandeur though it be, is yet subservient.

“As to the pure white ground, you had better adopt that at once, as, I can assure you, you will be forced to do so ultimately, for Hunt and Millais, whose works already kill everything in the exhibition for brilliancy, will in a few years force every one who will not drag behind them to use their methods.”
Ford Madox Brown to Lowes Dickenson.

This picture is to be seen at Manchester Art Gallery.

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Many technical questions beset a true revival which are of deeper interest to the actors in it than to the public at large. Such was the question of the introduction of oil as a medium in the old days; such was the question of the proper way to render brightness in our air. “You vagabond!” said Millais—as he watched Hunt painting in transparent colour, with light sable brushes, over a ground of half-moist white, the landscape of “The Hireling Shepherd”—“that’s just the way I paint flowers!” They had arrived at this method by independent lines of thought. To them, and to their brother artists, it was most important. Millais, delighted, proposed that they should keep it a secret—and instantly confided it to Ford Madox Brown. The outer world was more concerned with the fact that the sun could be made to shine upon canvas than with the way in which it was brought about. The one inevitable condition of the truth of a revival is always, by one method or by another, a return to Nature. This had been accomplished; and the world, as ever, divided—the few hailing what they saw as a revelation, the many denouncing it as heresy.

When a picture by the first Pre-Raphaelite was carried in triumph through the streets of Florence there were those who named that quarter Borgo Allegri; but there were those who declared that art was at an end now the Byzantine tradition had been broken. When the pictures of the last Pre-Raphaelite shone out at Burlington House, there were happy people who vowed they looked like “openings in the wall”; there were also those who declared that art had come to an end now the tradition of Raphael was ignored. Steadily, through evil report and good report, the painter went his way. He did not hold—as Millais came to hold in after years—that it was the business of the artist to find out what most people wanted, and to paint that. He did not hold—as Rossetti held—that it was the business of the artist to impose his will on a select band of followers, trained by himself to believe that the age of Dante was the Golden Age, and that colour should be based on the principles of illumination. He held that an artist was accountable to God. He held that an Englishman should study those minds, those words, which have more power over England than any others—should help to make those clear.

Shakespeare had led him to “rate lightly that kind of art devised only for the initiated, and to suspect all philosophies which assume that the vulgar are to be left for ever unredeemed.”