Scott says that these paintings were interesting as
designs; that they were "poems more than pictures, being large
illuminations and treated in a mediaeval manner." But he adds that not
one of the band knew anything about wall painting. They laid their
water-colours, not on a plastered surface, but on a rough brick wall,
merely whitewashed. They used no adhesive medium, and in a few months
the colours peeled off and the whole series became invisible.

A co-partnership in subjects, a duplication of treatment, or
interchange between the arts of poetry and painting characterise
Pre-Raphaelite work. For example, Morris' poems, "The Blue Closet"
and "The Tune of Seven Towers" were inspired by the similarly entitled
designs of Rossetti. They are interpretations in language of pictorial
suggestions--"word-paintings" in a truer meaning than that much-abused
piece of critical slang commonly bears. In one of these compositions--a
water-colour, a study in colour and music symbolism--four damozels in
black and purple, white and green, scarlet and white, and crimson, are
singing or playing on a lute and clavichord in a blue-tiled room; while
in front of them a red lily grows up through the floor. To this interior
Morris' "stunning picture"--as his friend called it--adds an obscurely
hinted love story: the burden of a bell booming a death-knell in the
tower overhead; the sound of wind and sea; and the Christmas snows
outside. Conversely Rossetti's painting, "Arthur's Tomb," was suggested
by Morris' so-named poem in his 1858 volume.

Or, again, compare Morris' poem, "Sir Galahad: A Christmas Mystery," with
the following description of Rossetti's aquarelle, "How Sir Galahad, Sir
Bors, and Sir Percival were fed with the Sanc Grael; but Sir Percival's
sister died by the way": "On the right is painted the altar, and in front
of it the damsel of the Sanc Grael giving the cup to Sir Galahad, who
stoops forward to take it over the dead body of Sir Percival's sister,
who lies calm and rigid in her green robe and red mantle, and near whose
feet grows from the ground an aureoled lily, while, with his left hand,
the saintly knight leads forward his two companions, him who has lost his
sister, and the good Sir Bors. Behind the white-robed damsel at the
altar, a dove, bearing the sacred casket, poises on outspread pinions;
and immediately beyond the fence enclosing the sacred space, stands a row
of nimbused angels, clothed in white and w