In the year 1848, three young English painters, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, founded the Preraphaelite Brotherhood, the aim of which was to bring back to modern art the sincerity of those painters who had preceded Raphael.

The original characteristics of the brotherhood’s work were a simplicity in the types chosen and a workmanship almost Flemish in its careful and minute finish. But later, and more particularly in the work of Rossetti, ‘Preraphaelism’ became associated with a certain mysticism of subject whose deeper meaning was accentuated and elucidated by the use of symbols and more especially flower symbols.

Rossetti’s earliest exhibited work was ‘The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,’ painted in 1849.

The Virgin with Saint Anne by her side, sits at an embroidery frame and works upon a strip of red material the lily with two flowers and a bud which grows in a vase before her. A little rosy winged angel waters the lily, and, lying crossed upon the ground, is a seven-leaved palm and a seven-thorned briar, united by a little scroll bearing the words ‘Tot dolores, tot gaudia.’

The second part of the double sonnet written by the artist for this picture explains to some extent the symbolism.

Behind the Virgin is the trellis of the ‘Enclosed Garden.’ Beyond—for still the ‘Holy One abides without’—is the vine, emblem of the ‘True Vine,’ the figure of Saint Joseph, who tends it, forecasting that he would be the guardian of Christ’s infancy. Upon the trellis, up which wreathes the white convolvulus, used in the 15th century as the symbol of humility, sits the Holy Dove.

Finally, upon the balustrade is a rose in a transparent vase, the rose of divine love conjoined with the symbol of transcendant purity.