So by the following spring (1849) all three pictures were ready for exhibition, and were hung, Millais's and Hunt's in the Academy, and Rossetti's either from choice or necessity in the so-called Free Exhibition held in a gallery at Hyde Park Corner. Here it was bought for £80 by the Marchioness of Bath, in whose family an aunt of Rossetti's was acting as governess. The picture is on many accounts a favourite one with lovers of Rossetti's work. Considering the painter's age and want of proper training, it is a masterly performance. The scene shown is a room in the Virgin's home, with an open balcony at which her father, St. Joachim, is tending a symbolically fruitful vine. On the right of the picture, are the figures of the Virgin and her mother seated at an embroidery frame. The young girl, a most untypical Madonna, in simple gray dress with pale green at the wrists, pauses with a needle in her hand, and gazes with a rapt ascetic look at the room before her, where, as if visible to her eyes, a child-angel is tending a tall white lily. Beneath the pot in which the lily grows are six large books bearing the names of the six cardinal virtues. These, and a dove perching on the trellis, are amongst the peaceful symbols of the picture, whilst the tragedy also is foreshadowed in a figure of the cross formed by the young vine-tendrils and in some strips of palm and "seven-thorned briar" laid across the floor. Rossetti painted the calm face of his mother for St. Anna, and his sister Christina for the Virgin, giving her, however, in contravention of the rule mentioned above, golden instead of dark brown hair. Although 1848 is intrinsically the year of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, much of the work of the next two years comes within the scope of its influence. As an example may be cited the important pen-and-ink drawing called _Il Saluto di Beatrice_, representing in two compartments the meeting of Dante and Beatrice, first in a street of Florence and secondly in Paradise. The whole composition was repeated in oil in 1859, and the meeting in Paradise formed the subject of more than one separate drawing. The cream of Rossetti's Pre-Raphaelite work, however, during the two years subsequent to 1848, is the _Ecce Ancilla Domini_, a sequel in sentiment to his picture of the previous year. This is well known to frequenters of the National Gallery at Millbank, and is described elsewhere. It was exhibited in 1850 under the same auspices as its predecessor (though the gallery this year was moved to Portland Place), and was priced at £50. Its appearance was the signal for a storm of abuse and raillery, which descended with impartial violence also upon the pictures of the other "Pre-Raphaelites" exhibited at the Academy, and pursued them relentlessly until time and success finally established their position. [Illustration: ECCE ANCILLA DOMINI.]