L’Enfance de la Vierge Marie

In 1848 a handful of young English painters, Rossetti among them, formed a secret society and gave themselves a cipher: P.R.B., for Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They told almost no one what it stood for. This was the first picture Rossetti finished as a member, and the first shown in public carrying those three letters, painted right into the signature, so that visitors in 1849 puzzled over initials no one would explain. It was also his first real oil painting. He kept the models close to home: his sister, the poet Christina Rossetti, sat for the young Mary, and their mother Frances for Saint Anne beside her. He painted in a deliberately plain, hard-edged manner, and packed the scene with objects meant to be read one at a time, from the lily to the stack of books, each standing for a virtue.