As a student in the dry atmosphere of the Academy Antique School Rossetti proved a failure, and never passed to the higher grades of the Life and Painting classes. Conventional methods of study were distasteful to him, and the traditions of the Academy were especially arid and cramping to the imagination. It will be necessary later on to give some description of the state into which the art of painting had fallen in England before the fresh minds of the young romantic school, breaking away under Rossetti's leadership, caused such a turmoil and revolution; but in the meantime, at the period we are dealing with, it is probably correct to say that Rossetti grew tired of, rather than disapproved of, the teaching in the school, that he was full of ideas craving utterance on canvas, and that he wanted to paint before he could properly draw. This impatience caused him to take a momentous and curious step, which certainly entailed harm to him as a technical executant, though it may indirectly have furthered his career as an artist. He decided to throw up the Academy training, and wrote to a painter of whom not many people at that date had heard, but whose work he himself admired, asking to be admitted into his studio as a pupil. This was Ford Madox Brown, and for his own particular needs and line of thought Rossetti could have lighted upon no man more absolutely suitable. Madox Brown was only seven years Rossetti's senior, but he had studied abroad at Ghent, Antwerp, Paris, and Rome, and had exhibited during the early forties some fine cartoon designs for the decoration of the new House of Lords. The pictures by Brown which Rossetti had seen, and which he mentioned in writing, were the _Giaour's Confession_, exhibited at the Academy in 1841, _Parisina_ (1845), _Our Lady of Saturday Night_, and _Mary Queen of Scots_, of which he remarked, "if ever I do anything in art, it will certainly be attributable to a constant study of that work." This, and other rather florid compliments of the same sort, may well have impressed Madox Brown, who was not accustomed to be complimented, with a shrewd idea that he was being made fun of; and the story has been told how, in a suspicious frame of mind, he armed himself with a stick and went forth to seek his unknown correspondent. On arriving at the house he was partly reassured by a door-plate; and the evident sincerity and enthusiasm of the boy himself, when they met, overcame his generous warm-heartedness, and made him agree to take Rossetti into his studio, and to teach him painting, not for a fee, which he declined, but for the sheer pleasure of encountering and training up a sympathetic spirit.