This thesis is about the fashion for the Primitives in Britain in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. By Primitives I mean the painters of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I have concentrated on Italian artists. However, since interest extended to earlier Netherlandish and German painters, some mention will be made of attitudes to them also. In my analysis of this fashion I have chosen to treat as self-contained units its various manifestations . Therefore, a short sketch of the course of the fashion might be useful here.