[Illustration: PLATE III.--THE KNIGHT ERRANT (Tate Gallery)
It is generally recognised that the effective representation of the nude figure imposes the severest test not only upon an artist's powers of drawing and painting but upon his sense of æsthetic propriety as well. The "Knight Errant" proves beyond dispute that Millais was able to pass this test triumphantly, for the picture is a magnificent technical achievement and is absolutely discreet in treatment. The subject, a lady rescued from robbers by a wandering knight, is one which occurs frequently in mediæval romance.]
They organised an association, the title of which, "The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood," significantly asserted the nature of their artistic aims, and as the founders of this association they pledged themselves to seek the inspiration of their art in those Italian painters who had lived before Raphael was born, and whose sterling principles were abandoned by Raphael and his successors. To the three founders of the Brotherhood were joined two other painters, James Collinson, and F. G. Stephens, a sculptor, Thomas Woolner and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's brother, William Michael, who, being a writer, was given the office of secretary. The Brotherhood, so constituted, was formally inaugurated in the autumn of 1848, and the members at once set to work to prove by their acts the reality of their belief in the creed they had adopted.
The first fruits of the movement were seen in the following spring at the Academy where Millais, who was then, it must be remembered, not quite twenty, exhibited his "Lorenzo and Isabella," a picture striking in its originality and in its unusual power. What it implied was not, however, immediately realised by the public; that the manner of the painting made it very unlike those by which it was surrounded was generally recognised, but most people, if they thought about the matter at all, seem to have assumed that the painter had failed to bring himself into line with the art of his time through youthful inexperience rather than by deliberate intention. Time and practice, they considered, would correct such deficiencies in taste as were apparent in the "Lorenzo and Isabella," and when the lad had arrived at years of discretion he would be the first to see the necessity for amendment.