Boldly they declared war against all conventional rules, described themselves as beginners and their pictures as attempts, and announced themselves to be, at any rate, sincere. The programme of their school was truth; not imitation of the old masters, but strict and keen study of nature such as the old masters had practised themselves. They were in reaction against the superficial dexterity of technique and the beauty of form and intellectual emptiness to which the English historical picture had fallen victim; they were in reaction against the trivial banality which disfigured English _genre_ painting. In the representation of passion the true gestures of nature were to be rendered, without regard to grace and elegance, and without the stock properties of pantomime. The end for which they strove was to be true and not to create what was essentially untrue by a borrowed idealism which had an appearance of being sublime. In opposition to the negligent painting of the artists of their age, they demanded slavishly faithful imitation of the model by detail, carried out with microscopic exactness. Nothing was to be done without reverence for nature; every part of a picture down to the smallest blade or leaf was to be directly painted from the original. Even at the expense of total effect every picture was to be carried out in minutest detail. It was better to stammer than to make empty phrases. A young and vigorous art, such as had been in the fifteenth century, could win its way, as they believed, from this conception alone.