the angel Gabriel are
blendings of several models; although, in its freedom from convention,
its austere simplicity, and endeavour to see the fact as it happened, the
piece is in the purest Pre-Raphaelite spirit. Ruskin insisted that,
while composition was necessarily an affair of the imagination, the
figures and accessories of a picture should be copies from the life. In
the early days of the Brotherhood there was an ostentatious
conscientiousness in observing this rule. We hear a great deal in
Rossetti's correspondence about the brick wall at Chiswick which he
copied into his picture "Found," and about his anxious search for a white
calf for the countryman's cart in the same composition. But all the
Pre-Raphaelites painted from the lay figure as well as from the living
model, and Rossetti, in particular, relied quite as much on memory and
imagination as upon the object before him. W. B. Scott thinks that his
most charming works were the small water-colours on Arthurian subjects;
"done entirely without nature and a good deal in the spirit of
illuminated manuscripts, with very indifferent drawing and perspective
nowhere." As for Millais, he soon departed from rigidly Pre-Raphaelite
principles, and became the most successful and popular of British artists
in genre. In natural talent and cleverness of execution he was the most
brilliant of the three; in imaginative intensity and originality he was
Rossetti's inferior--as in patience and religious earnestness he was
inferior to Hunt. It was Hunt who stuck most faithfully to the programme
of Pre-Raphaelitism. He spent laborious years in the East in order to
secure the exactest local truth of scenery and costume for his Biblical
pieces: "Christ in the Shadow of Death," "Christ in the Temple," and "The
Scapegoat." While executing the last-named, he pitched his tent on the
shores of the Dead Sea and painted the desert landscape and the actual
goat from a model tied down on the edge of the sea. Hunt's "Light of the
World" was one of the masterpieces of the school, and as it is typical in
many ways, may repay description. Ruskin pronounced it "the most perfect
instance of expressional purpose with technical power which the world has
yet produced."

In this tall, narrow canvas the figure of Christ occupies nearly half the
space. He holds a lantern in his hand and knocks at a cottage door. The
face--said to be a portrait of Venables, curate of St. Paul's, Oxford--is