Upon a wintry afternoon in London, in the year 1834, a little boy of six years old was standing on the stairs of a poor artist’s house, watching, through a window in the wall, the marvellous deeds of the man within. The man within was painting the “Burning of the Houses of Parliament.” Scarlet and gold! Scarlet and gold! He used them up so quickly that he had to grind and prepare more and more. Every time he ground with the muller on the slab a fresh supply of vermilion and chrome yellow, there was a fresh flare up of the conflagration, another outburst of applause from the little boy. Meantime, the artist’s wife put the kettle on the fire, and cut bread and butter as if nothing out of the way were going on; and by-and-by she and the father and their children sat down to tea. It seemed very strange to the little watchman that they could behave in this calm, everyday manner when such wonders were all about them in the room. Presently a porter came from a warehouse in Dyer’s Court, Aldermanbury, where dwelt a merchant, Mr. William Hunt; and he took the little boy home to his father.

This little boy had been born on the 2nd April 1827, in Wood Street, Cheapside, and was christened William Holman at St. Giles’s, Cripplegate. From the time that he could hold anything he held a pencil. When he was about four years old he begged for a brush and some paints, and his joy is thus described:

The warehouse was a mysterious place full of laughter and talk by day; empty, silent, and vast at night when the master went over it with a bull’s-eye lantern. A funny man called Henry Pinchers busied himself with velvet binding on the third floor. The jests of Henry Pinchers were of infinite charm. He had had to take two steps back for every step forward, he declared, one cold morning. “Then how did you get to the warehouse at all?” asked his delighted auditor. “Don’t you see, you silly boy, I turned round and walked backwards!” said Henry Pinchers.

Other people were not much more clear than he in their answers to questions. Temple Bar was so called “because there was no other name”; and the martyrs were burnt at Smithfield “because they were martyrs.” Whether the child found more satisfaction at the school to which, soon after, he was sent, does not appear. The lessons from the New Testament read to him there made a deep impression upon his mind, and were remembered in years to come. “The gain in thoughtfully-spent life is the continual disturbance of absolute convictions.” But there are certain convictions of childhood which are never effaced.

The choice of a profession was not left to the last moment in those days. He was but twelve when his father asked him what he would like to be. “A painter!” he said at once; and the sorrowful silence that followed told him what he knew already—that his choice was not looked on with approval.

His father had taken him away from school, and was about to find for him a situation in which he would have to go about with invoices for goods from nine in the morning till eight at night. No time for drawing; no time for painting in scarlet and gold! The idea did not harmonise with his presentiment of that which had to be. He set about to look for a place for himself, and explained the various qualifications that he possessed in the way of reading, writing, and arithmetic, to the master of a boy-friend who was leaving that gentleman’s office. After some friendly chaff as to why he had not thought of enlisting as a Grenadier, to which he replied in all good faith, “I really should like your place better,” his services were accepted, and his father—amused, and gratified, no doubt, by the master’s ready interest in the boy—consented that he should stay.

The master, Mr. James, drew and painted himself. Far from discouraging his apprentice, he gave him his own box of oil-colours with directions how to prepare them; draughtsmanship was studied at a night school for mechanics, and the little salary expended on weekly lessons from a portrait-painter who had learnt from a pupil of a pupil of Sir Joshua Reynolds. His father, who had permitted this, was displeased, however, to find that on Mr. James’s retirement he had time to visit the National Gallery; and once again, to avoid more unendurable subjection, he secured a place at the London Agency of Richard Cobden’s Manchester business. Here he sat by himself in a little room that looked out on three blank walls, made entries in a ledger, pondered over the Bible stories heard at school, and the far-away land where they happened, drew pen-and-ink flies on the window with such accurate realism that his employer took out a handkerchief to brush them away, designed patterns for calicoes—taught by an occasional clerk. Here, too, he painted the portrait of an old orange-woman called Hannah, a Jewess, who came into the office and asked him to buy of her; “if only for a handsel to break her ill-luck of the morning.”

The portrait was such a good likeness that the employer laughed aloud when he saw it; the fame of the thing spread fast. One night his father told him of this remarkable picture, adding that he certainly ought to see it; but no sooner had he discovered the artist than he threatened to take him away altogether if stricter discipline were not observed. Hunt was now sixteen; he had borne with the city for four years; if he waited until he came of age it would be too late to think of art as a profession. He took his life into his own hands, and declared that he meant to become a student at the Royal Academy, that he must be allowed to draw at the British Museum that he might qualify himself to pass the entrance examination.

He just contrived to make both ends meet by copy and portrait work three days out of the six. He learnt more from fellow-students than from masters. The first real instruction came from a pupil of Wilkie’s, who told him, as he sat copying “The Blind Fiddler,” that Wilkie painted without dead colour underneath, and finished each bit in turn like a fresco-painter. After this he found out for himself that quattrocentist work was very beautiful, and that the beauty of it was due to the early training of the artists in fresco. He was by nature hasty and impatient, and the city portrait-painter had encouraged rather than checked a tendency to handle his tools with loose bravura. He set himself to unlearn these lessons, to work with accurate and humble patience.

The hardest part of the endeavour had yet to come. Twice over he failed to find his name upon the list of those accepted as probationers for the Academy. Another precious year gone! His father appealed to him to give it up. “You are wasting time and energy. You can paint well enough to make friends admire you; but you cannot compete with others, who have genius to begin with, who have received an excellent education. Are you not yourself convinced?” The sense of discouragement was bitter. Six months more he asked for one other trial; if, for the third time, he failed, he would go back to business.

One day, as he stood at work in the Museum, a boy dressed in a velvet tunic, and belt, his bright brown hair curling over a turned-down white collar, darted aside as he went by, gazed attentively at the drawing for a minute or two, and was off again. He knew the boy, for he had seen him take the Gold Medal at the Academy over the head of all the older students. He returned the visit on his way through the Elgin room, where young Millais was at work on the Ulysses. Quickly the younger artist turned round.

At the next examination Hunt passed. “I told you so. I knew you’d soon be in,” said Millais, when next they met at the Academy. It was the beginning of one of those rare friendships that make high things possible.

In the room at 83 Gower Street, where Millais painted while his mother sat at her work-table, Holman Hunt was now often to be found.

Many and eager were the discussions that took place among the students. Hunt’s first visit to the National Gallery, while he was still at the office, had not been altogether a success. The Age of Brown was flourishing. “Bacchus and Ariadne” was brown then. In fact when, some few years later, it was cleaned, and the original colours appeared, many people said they preferred it brown. Lost in the brown air, and quite unable to derive any pleasure from “Venus attired by the Graces,” the new-comer, standing in front of Titian’s masterpiece, inquired where were “the really grand paintings of the great master’s?”

It took wonderful courage in those days to go on thinking that grass and trees were green, when all the eminent teachers maintained that so far as Art was concerned, they were brown, and that if you only painted them brown for several years “an eye for Nature” would come. They were green, however, at Ewell in Surrey, whither the young artist went one autumn. While he was there, his first picture, “Woodstock,” was sold for £20. Furthermore, a fellow-student borrowed from Cardinal Wiseman vol.i. of “Modern Painters,” and lent it to him for twenty-four hours. He sat up most of the night to read it.

He had fished out a copy of Keats from a box marked “This lot 4d.,” and determined to paint a scene from “The Eve of St. Agnes.” “It’s like a parson,” said Millais, laughing—a curious commentary on the reading of “Isabella”; but he soon came round. Millais had begun to assert his independence of judgment, to the no small wrath of his mother.

Some time afterwards, a wonderful conversation on the relative merits of the Old Masters was interrupted by a quiet knock at the door.

The mother made one more attempt; in vain. On went the talk. When Hunt had risen to say Good-bye,

The two boys worked hard. They sat up all night long in Millais’ studio; they kept themselves awake with coffee; they encouraged one another with talk; when Millais was tired to death of his own picture he worked on Hunt’s, and Hunt on his. “Cymon and Iphigenia” and “The Eve of St. Agnes” were sent in to the Academy at eleven o’clock on the last night possible for sending in at all, and next day, in the exuberance of their joyful relief, they accompanied the Chartist procession to Kensington Common—Millais keen to see more of the fray than his companion thought prudent.

One great disappointment bravely borne by Millais, marked the Academy of that year; “Cymon and Iphigenia” was not hung. Hunt, however, gained an outspoken admirer in the person of an Italian student, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. “The best picture there!” said he, as he stood before “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and he said it loudly too. He did not admire it the less because the subject was taken from Keats, whom he adored. He loved and studied “the Golden Gates of Ghiberti”—another point of agreement. He was passionately fond of Art, but dejected by the enforced study of glass bottles under the stern guidance of Ford Madox Brown. What was he to do? He could not go on with those bottles. Hunt consented that they should share a studio: and he became an ardent, fascinating, but very troublesome learner. He hummed and moaned, rocking himself to and fro as he sat thinking; he raved and raged while he was painting, causing angelic little girl models to weep; he sat up night after night before his easel, eating or sleeping as the fit came upon him. He was perpetually encircled by a crowd of noisy followers, and he had a most inconvenient way of showing them everything in the studio, and asking them all to supper when the cupboard was bare—a very different friend from the un-Bohemian Millais, who in those days would not even smoke a pipe.

“I have always been told by artists that a pipe is of incalculable comfort to the nerves, that when harassed by the difficulties of a problem it solaces them.”

“That is the very reason, it seems to me, for not smoking. A man ought to get relief only by solving his problem,” said Millais.

Very different, too, from the genial atmosphere of his home was that of the Rossetti household, where there were strange gatherings of Italian exiles by the hearth.

“Then you are Pre-Raphaelite!” the other students cried, laughing, when self-willed Hunt quoted Sir Charles Ball to prove that the action of the demoniac boy in Raphael’s “Transfiguration” was all wrong. The word was caught up, turned into a challenge, P and R, two of the mystic initials that were so soon to charm and to enrage London, were formed. The B was added at the suggestion of Rossetti, whose love of the mediÆval at once required a “Brotherhood.” Need it be said that there had to be seven Brothers, and that the Brotherhood was to be kept a secret? Rossetti’s brother William, who had never learnt how to draw; a nominal pupil of Hunt’s, F.G. Stephens, who had never learnt how to paint; Woolner, who was a sculptor, and James Collinson, were quickly enlisted. “Collinson,” said Rossetti, “is a born stunner.”

“Where’s your flock?” shouted out Millais. “I expected to see them behind you. Tell me all about it.”

They held their first meeting in his studio, over a set of engravings of the frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa. The three leaders were all, at this time, eager to establish some starting-point for their art “which would be secure, if it were ever so humble.” They admired what was true in the works of Raphael as much as any one else. “Pre-Raphaelitism is not Pre-Raphaelism,” but they held that, since his day, pride and the dogged observance of rule without reference to Nature had destroyed sincerity. As they turned over the pages of the book, they hailed with delight in the old frescoes of Gozzoli that “freedom from corruption, pride, and disease” for which they sought. “Think what a revelation it was to find such work at such a moment, and to recognise it with the triple enthusiasm of our three spirits!” They all agreed that they would make a series of designs from Keats in the new manner. Millais’ “Lorenzo and Isabella,” in his friends’ judgment the most wonderful picture ever painted by a man under twenty, was the immediate fruit of this resolve.

Nature had gifted Rossetti with a hopeful temperament which was of no small service to Hunt in the dark days of discouragement that followed. When the latter was tempted to mourn over the waste of his young years in the city, the former pointed out to him that he had learnt to know men, and the ways of men, instead of mere bookish things that were “of very little use in life.” What did it matter whether the sun went round the earth or the earth went round the sun? What did anything scientific matter in comparison with Dante, with the poetry of Browning, which he would recite, over the fire, by twenty pages at a time, with Tennyson and Henry Taylor and Coventry Patmore?[6] When Mr. James, the city man, the owner of the original colour-box, reduced Hunt to despair by his damning criticism of the new picture “Rienzi,” “But the man’s a born fool!” exclaimed Rossetti, with screams of laughter. When pounds, shillings, and pence ran low, “Can you not understand,” said he, “that there are hundreds of young aristocrats and millionaires growing up who will be only too glad to get due direction how to make the country as glorious as Greece was, and as Italy?” In Paris, in Belgium, in the country he was the most delightful of companions, and it was he who led as the Brethren walked up and down Stanhope Street after their work, singing the Marseillaise or Mourir pour la patrie.

Throughout his youth, however, Rossetti acted on impulse, without consideration as to the effect upon others. When it was time to send in for the Academy he was not quite ready with the charming picture painted in Hunt’s studio, and, for the sake of a few more days in which to finish, he sent instead to the Hyde Park Gallery, which opened a week earlier than Burlington House. “The Girlhood of Mary, Virgin,” signed with the mystic P.R.B., the meaning of which was then unknown, except to the seven Brothers, appeared, therefore, a week earlier than Hunt’s “Rienzi” and Millais’ “Lorenzo and Isabella,” signed with the same initials, and, for good and for evil, Rossetti began to be spoken of as the precursor of a new school. The effect on him was twofold. Unable to endure hostile criticism, at the first touch of it, the year after, when he showed “The Annunciation,” he resolved that he would never again exhibit in public; but, pleased at the pre-eminence given him by those who were not behind the scenes, he withdrew from partnership with Hunt in the studio; and more and more, as time went on, from his society and that of Millais.

“Rienzi” honourably hung in the large room, pendant to “Lorenzo and Isabella,” made a favourable impression, but was not sold until after the closing of the Academy; and meantime, the landlord seized Hunt’s books, furniture, and sketches, and he was obliged to return to his family. As soon as he could he paid the man, who thought he had been “shamming poverty.” At one time he was not able to post a letter because he had not even a penny wherewith to buy the stamp; as he threw himself back on a chair, he thrust his hand between the back and the seat, and lo, it came in contact with half-a-crown! When he went to Lambeth to paint the background of “Claudio and Isabella,” the man who carried his traps was so much better dressed that the porter was taken for the artist. Still, he was in good heart, and he and Millais, eager to improve the reputation already gained, were hard at work upon two large works, “Christians escaping from Persecuting Druids” and “Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop,” when all at once a derisive paragraph appeared in one of the papers, betraying the significance of the three letters, P.R.B., and holding up the new school to ridicule. Munro the sculptor had wormed the secret out of Rossetti, and, after promising not to tell, he had passed it on to a journalist.

The storm of anger which followed was curiously out of proportion to the cause. The Germ, a magazine started at Rossetti’s instigation, to be the organ of Pre-Raphaelites, would have failed, it may be, in any case, for lack of funds; but jealousy, and that hatred of light which is peculiar to old institutions, can alone account for the venomous reception of the new pictures, when once the secret of the letters became known. The Academy sprang to arms; the older artists, and their pupils, waxed furious. They enlisted literature on their side. Dickens joined in the hue and cry. With the honourable exception of The Spectator, every single paper attacked the men who had dared to break with tradition. Raphael had been insulted; Raphael was, it appeared, the idol of all England.

Ruskin came, flashing, to the rescue a year later, with a letter to The Times, in which he declared that since the days of Albert DÜrer, there had been nothing in art so earnest or so complete as the pictures of Millais and Holman Hunt. They were not this year hung together; they were placed in a less favourable light. The onslaughts of the press were well sustained. “Valentine and Sylvia” (the subject taken from Shakespeare’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona”) had suffered, in part, from Hunt’s distress of mind and the want of means occasioned by the bad conduct of a man whom he trusted; even after Ruskin’s letter no one ventured to buy. Nobody came to him for a portrait now. His father’s acquaintance in the city offered to bet £10 that any picture of his would be sent back within a week. Anonymous insults poured in upon him. A publisher, who had asked for illustrations of Longfellow, declined to publish them. Debt was staring him in the face, and failure seemed absolute.

At this crisis of fortune, when he had resolved that he must give up Art and adopt some other line of life—preferably that of a settler in the backwoods—Millais came forward. He had freed himself from personal straits only a week or two earlier; now, with the warm concurrence of his father and mother, he offered to share every penny he had with his friend. His generous will to help overcame all resistance; the money—repaid the following year—was advanced; and the two Brothers went off to Surbiton together, to paint “Ophelia” and “The Hireling Shepherd.” “Valentine and Sylvia” had been retouched and sent to Liverpool, where a prize of £50 was offered for the finest painting.

Never did the two gentlemen, even in their native Verona, provoke more comment than followed their footsteps wherever they appeared in England. Immediately, anonymous insults in letters and papers began again. Week after week went by; there was not a word from the authorities. At last it grew intolerable. The painter turned on his tormentors. He had never seriously expected such distinction for a moment; but he determined to write to the committee, and ask, by way of bitter satire, why the prize had not been awarded to him. Happily, his designs, and a book in which he was interested, kept him up too late to begin that night. Next morning, as he sat at work not far from the house, he heard Millais’ voice, “Another letter from Liverpool”! “Valentine and Sylvia” had won the prize; and they gave three cheers for the Council in chorus.

The happy days of comradeship at the old, ghost-haunted house called Worcester Park Farm glided by all too fast. Millais became intent upon “The Huguenot”; Hunt continued “The Hireling Shepherd” while the sun shone; after dark he threw his strength into “The Light of the World.” Whenever the moon was full, although it was so cold that people skated in the daytime, he would work out-of-doors from nine at night until five the next morning. For the most part he enjoyed undisturbed solitude, but now and then a friendly guardian of the public peace came to see what he was about.

“Have you seen other artists painting landscape about here?” he inquired.

“I can’t exactly say as I have at this time o’ night,” said the policeman.

His nocturnal studies continued to arouse interest even after the return to London. As he was coming back to Chelsea on a ’bus one night the driver entertained him with descriptions of the eccentric persons who lived there, Carlyle among them, “and I’ve been told as how he gets his living by teaching people to write.” Then he went on confidentially, “But I’ll show you another queer cove if you’re coming round the corner. You see him well from the ’bus. He’s a cove, in the first place, as has a something standing all night at one winder, while he sits down at the other, or stands, and seemingly is a-drawing of it. He doesn’t go to bed like other Christians, but stays long after the last ’bus has come in; and, as the perlice tells us, when the clock strikes four, out goes the gas, down comes the gemman, opens the street door, runs down Cheyne Walk as hard as he can pelt, and when he gets to the end he turns and runs back again, opens his door, goes in, and nobody sees no more of him.”

Pre-Raphaelitism went steadily forward. “The Light of the World” was not yet ready, but the wonderful Academy of 1852 contained “The Hireling Shepherd,” Millais’ “Ophelia” and “The Huguenot,” and Ford Madox Brown’s fine picture, painted after the same method, “Christ Washing Peter’s Feet.” “The Strayed Sheep,” a beautiful little landscape begun for a gentleman who admired “The Hireling Shepherd,” but did not wish for so large a picture, was painted at Fairlight, soon afterwards. At the Academy of 1853 “Claudio and Isabella” hung in the first room. In 1854 “The Light of the World” was finished, and sold to Mr. Combe of Oxford. “The Awakened Conscience” went to the Academy the same year.

And now a plan that had been in the artist’s mind ever since, as a child, he listened to the words of the New Testament at school, found sudden fulfilment. The cry of the East was in his ears; he would go to the East, and paint a sacred picture there. As on so many other occasions throughout his life, he met with violent opposition. He would lose all that he had gained at such cost and have to begin over again on his return; he would find nothing but overgrown weeds, no beauty that was not tenfold more beautiful in England; he would get Syrian fever and be an invalid for the rest of his days; he would die like Wilkie. Rossetti said that local colour interfered with the poetry of design. Ruskin said that he was giving up the real purpose of his life, which was to train a new school of art. What Millais said does not appear. What Millais did was to help in the packing, which had been left to the last minute, so that there was no time for dinner, and to rush to the buffet for any “likely food” that he could find and toss it into the railway carriage after the train had begun to move.

Upon a parting gift from Rossetti were written these lines from “Philip van Artevelde”: