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Happy slaves to nature, the Pre-Raphaelites painted every blade of grass with tender loving care. Such devotion led to compulsive extremes. In Hunt's passion for accuracy, he traveled several times to Palestine to catch its religious fever for scenes from the life of Christ. Millais, who painted his Ophelia afloat, made the model for it lie in a bathtub for lifelike dampness, while he painstakingly added the greenery leaf by leaf. Ford Madox Brown, sometime teacher of Rossetti, took 13 years to finish one oil. The whole output of the Pre-Raphaelites is relatively small.
Illuminated Damsels. Turning away from the neutral beige ground then commonly used, the Pre-Raphaelites prepared their canvas with white lead and varnish, painting while it was still wet. The result was brighter colors than were thought tasteful in the mid-19th century. Their hidden brushstrokes built up surface details more like medieval illuminations than bravura oils. Their posing was selfconscious, but they believed it appropriate. Rossetti, a better poet than painter, described his damsels' turrety necks as "round, reared necks, meet columns of Love's shrine."
From the start, the Pre-Raphaelites were a volatile, youthful lot. It was hardly unexpected that their brotherhood broke up less than 15 years after they formed it. Only William Holman Hunt was bitter about the brotherhood's end. Millais brushed it off as a youthful fancy, eventually became president of the Royal Academy, earned £30,000 a year and a baronetcy for his fashionable portraiture. Burne-Jones also got a title, doing Tennysonian tapestries of never-never land subjects in colors that inspired the Gilbert and Sullivan phrase "greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery." Brown gave up the dreamy past to picture the working classes as the center of England's new society. And Rossetti, who became a drug addict after his model-wife died, abandoned fidelity to nature for a mystical symbolism.
At the Wall. The Pre-Raphaelites did sense one vital problem: the separation of the artist from society. They sought to reintegrate painting with the decorative arts. They wanted new medieval guilds to combat machine-made bric-a-brac that was flooding the consumer market with bad design in the mid-1850s. One do-it-themselves attempt was made when Oxford University buildings were under construction in the late 1850s. Rossetti and Burne-Jones hacked away along with the stonemasons, trying to re-create the unified effect of Gothic craftsmen. It was a failure: Rossetti's mural, for example, began to fade within six months. They just did not know enough about what they professed to love. But now, by the lucky hindsight that restores vision, the Pre-Raphaelites seem revolutionaries of their time, eager to better man's artistic experience in a world growing less and less human by virtue of the machine.