When Ford Madox Ford says in his autobiographical reminiscences, Memories and Impressions, that in Bernard Shaw “the last faint trickle of Pre-Raphaelite influence is to be perceived,” he is talking specifically about Shaw's affinities with the utopian socialism of William Morris and Shaw's preference for the “grayness and roughness” in dress affected by Rossetti, Morris, and their disciples. But Ford's reference to Shaw as a Pre-Raphaelite has justification for more reasons than Ford suggests, not the least of which is Shaw's own claim to be a Pre-Raphaelite dramatist. In the Preface to Plays Pleasant (1898) Shaw says that Candida was the result of his 1894 trip to Florence, “where I occupied myself with the religious art of the Middle Ages and its destruction by the Renascence,” and of a previous trip to Birmingham, where he attended a Pre-Raphaelite exhibit and saw the church windows of Morris and Burne-Jones. The Preface continues, “On the whole, Birmingham was more hopeful than the Italian cities; for the art it had to shew me was the work of living men. … When my subsequent visit to Italy found me practising the playwright's craft, the time was ripe for a modern pre-Raphaelite play. Religion was alive again, coming back upon men, even upon clergymen, with such power that not the Church of England itself could keep it out.” An examination of Shaw's concept of Pre-Raphaelitism not only illuminates the theme of Candida but also reveals Shaw's early formulation of the idea that the artist is, to use Shaw's terminology from the Preface to Back to Methuselah, an iconographer of a living religion.