Their feeling for beauty of form and purity of colour, and their aloofness from the modern world, impart to their work an atmosphere that may remind us of the fifteenth century, though the fifteenth century could never have produced it.
Rossetti and Burne-Jones, indeed, never formally joined the Brotherhood, though they were influenced by its ideals and pursued the same strict fidelity to nature in all the accessories of a picture.
Millais and Holman Hunt, original members of the Brotherhood, painted men and women of the mid-Victorian epoch with every detail of their peaked bonnets and plaid shawls, and were comparatively indifferent to beauty of form and face.

But Rossetti and Burne-Jones created a type of ideal beauty which they employed on their canvases with persistent repetition.

Burne-Jones founded his type upon the angels of Botticelli, and his drapery is like that of the ring of dancers in the sky in our picture of the 'Nativity.' You are probably familiar with some of his pictures and perhaps have felt the spell of his pure gem-like colouring and pale, haunting faces.

It was the people of their minds' eye who sat beside their easels.

Rossetti lived and worked in the romantic mood of a Giorgione, but instead of expressing the atmosphere of his fairy city of Venice, he created one as far as possible removed from his own mid-Victorian surroundings.