HAIL AND FAREWELL: Ave, Salve, Vale

At the end of the 'forties Ruskin preached: Let us abandon ourselves unreservedly to Nature, and his teaching gave birth to Pre-Raphaelitism, unless indeed the truth is that the painters Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt stood up one evening in a studio in Newman Street, all three crying together: If we purify ourselves in ignorance and put our trust in Nature, we shall rediscover the innocency of the painters of the fifteenth century. So did Robert Ross relate to me the story of the movem...