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He was the darling, too, of another boy, William Holman Hunt, also an art student, who came to the prize-giving especially to see the infant prodigy. Soon Hunt and Millais were close friends. By the time Millais was 18, the two had "agreed they must strike out a new line. Art was getting stale and empty. Raphael and the 'Grand Manner' were overdone." They would go back to the golden age of painting before Raphael. A young Oxford critic, John Ruskin, had pointed out the new direction: "Go to nature in all singleness of heart, selecting nothing, rejecting nothing." Following this undiscriminating line with loyal literalness, young Hunt went to Kew Gardens, chopped down a 12-ft. palm tree, copied it as background for his painting of Christ and the Two Marys.
Soon Millais and Hunt were joined by a third recruit, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, an eccentric Anglo-Italian poet. Under Hunt's tutelage, Poet Rossetti became a painter, drew up a list of immortals who would constitute "the whole of our creed." Like a current movie, each immortal was graded by stars. Christ received four stars, the author of the Book of Job three, King Alfred two, Tennyson one. Kosciusko, Columbus, Joan of Arc also ran. The young star givers decided to call themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Rossetti hoped they would "abjure bohemianism, swearing and drinking; rescue fallen women."
Farce & Agony. With a few other members, the Brotherhood thereupon started on a career which Author Gaunt calls "a mixture of the jolliest farce and the strangest agony. . . . Obliging countrymen shot water rats for Millais and held down sheep for Hunt to copy with the requisite care." Redheaded, swan-necked Elizabeth Siddal, Rossetti's ideal of womanly beauty, lay in an icy bath for hours on end while Millais painted her as the drowning Ophelia.
Unfortunately each had his own idea of the aims of the group. Holman Hunt's idea was religious. He soon left for Palestine. There on the shores of the Dead Sea, with an umbrella over his head to protect him from the sun and a double-barreled rifle on his left arm to protect him from the Arabs, he painted The Scapegoat, one of the first sensational Pre-Raphaelite pictures. On the barren beach stood a white goat, symbol in Hunt's mind of the sins of the world. Behind lay the mountains of Moab and the caves of Sodom. Said the Art Journal: "An extremely forbidding specimen of the capriformous race."
John Everett Millais took this critical reception of his friend's goat as a warning. "Take my advice, old boy," he told Hunt, "accept the world as it is and don't rub up people the wrong way." Hastily, Millais became a regular visitor at the great country houses. "Few artists," says Author Gaunt, ". . . have laid low so many stags and birds. . . ." Dropping his palette at the flicker of a wing, Millais would blaze away at any passing bird, once winged an old lady at her cottage door.