Frederic George Stephens

Frederic George Stephens (10 October 1827 – 9 March 1907) was a British art critic, and one of the two 'non-artistic' members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

He joined their Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, often modelling for them in pictures including Millais's Ferdinand Lured by Ariel (1849) and Ford Madox Brown's Jesus Washing Peter's Feet[2] (1852–1856; Tate, London).

In later life he claimed to have destroyed all his paintings, but three of them are now in the Tate Gallery, London: The Proposal (The Marquis and Griselda)[4] (1850–51), Morte d'Arthur[5] (1849), and Mother and Child[6] (circa 1854–1856), along with a pencil drawing of his stepmother Dorothy[7] (1850), a study for an oil portrait he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1852.

A large pen-and-ink drawing illustrating a subject from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Pardoner's Tale, Dethe and the Riotours (1848–1854), which he gave to Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1854, is now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

In 1875, Stephens began to characterise himself as an art historian rather than a critic and in 1877 he started to write contributions for the Grosvenor Gallery catalogues, which he continued to do until 1890.

Hunt became increasingly paranoid, and interpreted a money gift from Stephens for his newborn son to be a slight, sending it back.

In 1895 he published a book on Lawrence Alma-Tadema and his review of the posthumous exhibition of Millais in 1898 took the painter to task for poorly thought-out works.

Stephens' conservative views on modern art and his strong dislike of Impressionism ended his forty-year association with the Athenaeum.