The artistic development of Madox Brown does not, then, offer any abrupt or marked transition from the first crude workings to the perfected application of the Pre-Raphaelite idea. This he pursued steadfastly, and with an unhasting diligence and quiet independence of spirit which indicates his kinship of temperament to Holman Hunt rather than to his impulsive and volatile pupil Rossetti, or to the impressionable Millais of early days. The complete outward divergence between the art of Madox Brown and that of Rossetti after, let us say, the “Triptych” for Llandaff Cathedral, painted by the latter in 1859–1860, illustrates not only the consistent progress of the former in his own distinctive line, but also the extraordinary fertility and cumulative splendour of Rossetti’s genius, which could create for itself during the next fifteen years so much more original and versatile a habit wherewith to clothe the noble and exquisite visions that thronged his imagination, each with the urgency of “a presence that is not to be put by.” [Illustration: “PANDORA.” From the chalk. _By permission of Mr. Theodore Watts._ ] For the last twenty years of Rossetti’s artistic life he was known, and should be judged, supremely as a colourist; and from 1862 to 1874 his technical power reached its highest level. After completing in oils the “Triptych” for the Llandaff altar-piece, “The Infant Christ Adored by a Shepherd and a King,” Rossetti began to pursue more carefully, and with increasing success both from the æsthetic and the professional point of view, the system of half-length or three-quarter length female figure- studies, chiefly symbolic in motive, which he had already attempted brilliantly in the “Bocca Baciata” (“The Kissed Mouth”) of 1859, and which afterwards yielded such imaginative and technical triumphs as “Beata Beatrix” (1863), “The Blue Bower,” one of the most brilliant and sensuous of his paintings (1864); “Lady Lilith,” the type of purely physical loveliness, described in his sonnet “Body’s Beauty” (1864); “Il Ramoscello” (“The Branchlet”), or “Bellebuona” (“Fair and Good”), a gem of pearl-white colouring (1865); “Monna Vanna,” a superb study in white and gold (1866); “Venus Verticordia,” personifying again the earthly Pandemos, with the apple of temptation in her hand (1864–1877); “The Beloved, or the Bride of the Canticles;” and “Sibylla Palmifera” (“Beauty the Palm-giver”), both typifying intellectual and spiritual beauty (1866–1873); “The Loving Cup” (1867); “Aurelia,” or “Fazio’s Mistress” (Angiola of Verona, loved by Fazio degli Uberti, mentioned by Dante), another somewhat sensuous model (1863–1873); “La Pia,” the unhappy and captive wife of Nello della Pietra (from Dante’s “Purgatorio”), seen in her prison overlooking the Maremma (1868–1881); “Mariana,” from Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” (1869–1871); “Pandora opening her fatal casket” (1869–1875); “Proserpine,” empress of