Jeffery and E.Cooke at the Working Women's (afterwards the Working Men and Women's) College, Queen Square.
In this labour he had two allies; one a friend of Maurice's, Lowes Dickinson, the well-known artist, whose portrait of Maurice was mentioned with honour in the "Notes on the Academy"; his portrait of Kingsley hangs in the hall of the novelist-professor's college at Cambridge.

The other helper was new friend.
To people who know him only as the elegant theorist of art, sentimental and egotistic, as they will have it, there must be something strange, almost irreconcilable, in his devotion, week after week and year after year, to these night-classes.

Still more must it astonish them to find the mystic author of the "Blessed Damozel," the passionate painter of the "Venus Verticordia," working by Ruskin's side in this rough navvy-labour of philanthropy.
It was early in 1854 that a drawing of D.G.Rossetti was sent to Ruskin by a friend of the painter's.

The critic already knew Millais and Hunt personally, but not Rossetti.

He wrote kindly, signing himself "yours respectfully," which amused the young painter.