true regardless of the sensuous, was added a
morbidity of thought mingled with mysticism, a moral and religious
pose, and a studied simplicity. Some of the painters of the
Brotherhood went even so far as following the habits of the early
Italians, seeking retirement from the world and carrying with them a
Gothic earnestness of air. There is no doubt about the sincerity that
entered into this movement. It was an honest effort to gain the true,
the good, and as a result, the beautiful; but it was no less a
striven-after honesty and an imitated earnestness. The Brotherhood did
not last for long, the members drifted from each other and began to
paint each after his own style, and pre-Raphaelitism passed away as it
had arisen, though not without leaving a powerful stamp on English
art, especially in decoration.

Rossetti, an Italian by birth though English by adoption, was the type
of the Brotherhood. He was more of a poet than a painter, took most of
his subjects from Dante, and painted as he wrote, in a mystical
romantic spirit. He was always of a retiring disposition and never
exhibited publicly after he was twenty-eight years of age. As a
draughtsman he was awkward in line and not always true in modelling.
In color he was superior to his associates and had considerable
decorative feeling. The shortcoming of his art, as with that of the
others of the Brotherhood, was that in seeking truth of detail he lost
truth of _ensemble_. This is perhaps better exemplified in the works
of Holman Hunt. He has spent infinite pains in getting the truth of
detail in his pictures, has travelled in the East and painted types,
costumes, and scenery in Palestine to gain the historic truths of his
Scriptural scenes; but all that he has produced has been little more
than a survey, a report, a record of the facts. He has not made a
picture. The insistence upon every detail has isolated all the facts
and left them isolated in the picture. In seeking the minute truths
he has overlooked the great truths of light, air, and setting. His
color has always been crude, his values or relations not well
preserved, and his brush-work hard and tortured.

Millais showed some of this disjointed effect in his early work when
he was a member of the Brotherhood. He did not hold to his early
convictions however, and soon abandoned the pre-Raphaelite methods for
a more conventional style. He has painted some remarkable portraits
and some excellent figure pieces,