Picture a bunch of well-to-do art-school kids. They’re not truly excellent painters, but they basically say fuck-you to their teachers; we can paint better than any of you crusty old bastards. With supreme arrogance, they decided that the art world needed a revolution. Remarkably, they put their heads together and succeeded. This wasn’t the 1990s though, it was 1884 and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, as they called themselves, transformed the course of art forever. They were the predecessors to not only familiar names such as Damien Hurst and Tracy Emin, but the seeds of rock music, punk and rap. Because while they may not have been the most technically brilliant artists in the world, the PRB crystallised many of the principals that make art so great today: Above all, they said, great art should be about passionately expressed truth. It should be real, it should be original, and it should be relevant; it should say something about life and say it boldly. Make art political, make it radical, make it do whatever it must to attract attention, grab the front page and YELL – or as they put it, make it ‘devise some means of attracting [people’s] sympathies’. Johnny Rotten, the Stones, Eminem; they owe a lot to those Victorians: John Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt.