Renowned for their bohemian lifestyle as much as for their art, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood brought notoriety to British painting in the nineteenth century. The Pre-Raphaelites set out to reform contemporary art, to make it "true to nature." Yet their greater achievement was to revolutionize the idea of how contemporary artists should live, look and behave. This book describes and illustrates the lives of the Pre-Raphaelites, revealing both their social relationships and artistic ideals. Born from the youthful enthusiasm of John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Brotherhood was founded as a semi-secret group committed to exposing the art of the Royal Academy as tired, trivial and "sloshy." Their pictures made an initial splash, inviting criticism as outlandish, ugly, crude and irreverent. But, from the start, their private lives, from the tragedy of Elizabeth Siddal's drug-induced demise to the triumph of Millais's appointment as President of the RA, attracted equal notoriety. Jan Marsh's compelling account of these remarkable men and women uses their contemporary portraits to explore not only individual personalities, but also the artistic force that bound the circle together.