Paint beauty on purpose

In June 1850, Charles Dickens reviewed a painting by a 21-year-old. He wrote that the boy in it was "hideous, wry-necked, blubbering" and that the kneeling woman was "so horrible in her ugliness" she would stand out "as a Monster" even in "the lowest gin-shop in England."

The painter was John Everett Millais, one of a group of young painters who called themselves the Pre-Raphaelites. The painting showed Jesus as a boy in his father's carpentry shop, dirt on the floor and all. The fuss got so loud that Queen Victoria had it carried to Buckingham Palace so she could look at it in private.

Dickens's real complaint, if you read the whole piece, was that beauty had been thrown out. Ever since Raphael, he wrote, beauty had been treated as something a painting needs, and these young painters were out to get rid of it.

Two years later, Millais showed Ophelia

He spent five months on the bank of a river outside London, up to eleven hours a day, painting the water and the weeds. Back in his studio he put a young woman from a hat shop, Elizabeth Siddal, in a bathtub with oil lamps underneath, and painted her floating. The lamps went out. She caught a bad cold, and her father wrote to Millais demanding £50 for her medical bills.

Almost every flower in that water means something. The willow leaning over her stands for forsaken love. Nettles mean pain. Daisies stand for innocence, violets for faithfulness. The red poppy means sleep and death, and it isn't in Shakespeare's play at all. Millais put it there.

The Times said he'd soused Ophelia "in a weedy ditch." It went on to become one of the best-selling postcards at the Tate.

The fight is still on, and it still ends the same way

After the First World War, critics wrote the Pre-Raphaelites off as sentimental. In January 2018, a gallery in Manchester took a Waterhouse painting of nymphs off the wall of a room called In Pursuit of Beauty and pulled the postcards from the shop. Seven days later the painting was back. "Many people feel very strongly about the issues raised," the gallery's interim director said.

Painters still hear it: pretty means lightweight, and romance belongs on greeting cards.

We think beauty is a skill, and we'd rather teach it than apologize for it. Collage, texture paste, acrylic and oil are how you build the painting. A symbol in the right place, like Millais's poppy, is what makes it say something. You can learn it on purpose, and that's what these three days are for.