It is improbable that an aversion to the one-model rule, which has been attributed to Ford Madox Brown as a reason for holding aloof from the Brotherhood, had very much to do with his decision to remain independent of it. Mr. Madox Brown was from the first in cordial sympathy with the movement, and on terms of intimate friendship with its leaders, but he foresaw the dangers of an artistic clique, and, perhaps, the impossibility of permanent consonance of method between temperaments so diverse as those of the seven members enlisted. Nor was his own strong and individualistic style of painting quite in harmony with the manner of his younger friends. He was pre-eminently an historical painter; and the critical and romantic treatment of history, though bordering very closely on Pre-Raphaelite ground, hardly came within the immediate scope of the Brotherhood. Though frequently acknowledged by his later critics as the father—or sometimes the grandfather—of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Mr. Madox Brown consistently disclaimed any such title, and did so with no less justice than modesty. At the same time, his work was so intimately connected with that of the men whom he powerfully influenced and inspired that it may fairly be studied side by side with theirs in illustration of the dominant principles common to all. In the autumn of 1848 it was agreed that the three chief painters should select their next subjects from Keats’s “Isabella.” Millais, at that time under the influence of Hunt rather than of Rossetti (who indeed was still far from adopting any definite line of _technique_), decided upon a scene depicting Lorenzo at supper with Isabella and her brothers. The pensive and earnest face of Lorenzo was painted from W.M. Rossetti. Mrs. Hodgkinson, the wife of Millais’s half-brother, sat for Isabella. It would not be easy to disprove Holman Hunt’s generous but weighty verdict on the finished picture, as “the most wonderful painting that any youth still under twenty years of age ever did in the world.”