Bottles

In the spring of 1848 the young Dante Gabriel Rossetti, barely 20 and impatient to paint Dante and medieval romance, talked his way into the studio of the older painter Ford Madox Brown. Brown wanted to see whether the boy would really do the work, so he set him to copy a plain arrangement of bottles, exactly as they stood. Rossetti was bored almost at once and did not last long as a pupil. The timing is the thing. Within months of grinding through dull still lifes like this one, he joined William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais to found the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the group that would make his name. What survives in this little canvas is the discipline he resented, glass and light and reflection set down patiently, before anyone would let him paint what he actually wanted.