The artist most closely allied to him in technique is _Ford Madox Brown_, who did not reckon himself officially with the pre-Raphaelites, though he followed the same principles in what concerned the treatment of detail. Only a little senior to the founders of the Brotherhood--he was nine-and-twenty at the time--he is to be regarded as their more mature ally and forerunner. Rossetti was under no illusion when, in the beginning of his studies, he turned to him directly. In those years Madox Brown was the only English painter who was not addicted to the trivialities of paltry _genre_ painting or the theatrical heroics of traditional history. He is a bold artist, with a gift of dramatic force and a very rare capacity of concentration, and these qualities hindered him from following the doctrine of the pre-Raphaelites in all its consequences. If he had, in accordance with their programme, exclusively confined himself to work from the living model, several of his most striking and powerful pictures would never have been painted. [Illustration: SIR JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS.] [Illustration: _Cassell & Co._ MILLAIS. LORENZO AND ISABELLA.] [Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._ MILLAIS. THE NORTH-WEST PASSAGE.] Madox Brown passed his youth on the Continent--in Antwerp with Wappers, in Paris, and in Rome. The pictures which he painted there in the beginning of the forties were produced, as regards technique, under the influence of Wappers. The subjects were taken from Byron: "The Sleep of Parisina" and "Manfred on the Jungfrau." It is only in the latter that an independent initiative is perceptible. In contradistinction from the generalities of the school of Wappers he aimed at greater depth of psychology and accuracy of costume, while at the same time he endeavoured, though without success, to replace the conventional studio light by the carefully observed effect of free light. These three things--truth of colour, of spiritual expression, and of historical character--were from this time forth his principal care. And when his cartoon of "Harold," painted in Paris in the year 1844, was exhibited in Westminster Hall, it was chiefly this scrupulous effort at truth which made such a vivid impression upon the younger generation. In the first masterpiece which he painted after his return to London in 1848 he stands out already in all his rugged individuality. "Lear and Cordelia," founded on a most tragic passage in the most tragic of the great dramas of Shakespeare, is here treated with impressive cogency. It stood in such abrupt opposition to the traditional historical painting that perhaps nothing was ever so sharply opposed to anything so universally accepted. The figures stand out stiff and parti-coloured like card kings, without fluency of line or rounded and generalised beauty. And the colouring is just as incoherent. The brown sauce, which every one had hitherto respected like a binding social law, had given way to a