Please click on the image for a larger image.
Please click [here] for a modern image of the painting.

The lady was trying to be a realist:

“Out flew the web, and floated wide.
The mirror cracked from side to side.”

“A man’s work must be the reflex of a living image in his own mind, and not the icy double of the facts themselves. It will be seen that we were never realists. I think art would have ceased to have the slightest interest for any of us had the object been only to make a representation, elaborate or unelaborate, of a fact in nature. Independently of the conviction that such a system would put out of operation the faculty making man “like a God,” it was apparent that a mere imitator gradually comes to see nature claylike and finite, as it seems when illness brings a cloud before the eyes.”

The practice of making independent studies for pictures which was dear to the heart of Rossetti, was discouraged by Hunt and Millais because they feared to lose unity of effect if they dwelt upon details except in their relation to the whole. They painted, first the background, after the manner described, straight from Nature; if possible, they placed the figures in the open air and studied them outside the studio walls.

There are curious differences to be noted whenever the picture is repeated, and they seem to be always in the direction of something more complex than the original. In the larger version of “The Hireling Shepherd,” he is far more subtle and sophisticated, while the shepherdess looks older and more scornful. In the smaller version of “The Triumph of the Innocents,” the hues of a soft, moonlit night prevail, the Virgin is just a sweet mother, the Child is blessing the children. In the larger version moonlight intensified, which was found by means of a lens to be that of the sun, bathes the children; the Virgin, who is much older, gazes upon them with eyes in which a joyful wonder seems to be fighting still with almost unconquerable sorrow; the Child, a wheat-ear in his hand, has thrown himself back in an ecstasy of divine laughter. The large water-colour of “Christ among the Rabbis,” the rainbow halo encircling the head of the Child as he meditates, while the dark-eyed boys, Nicodemus and Stephen, look on, is different in every respect from “The Finding in the Temple.”

IV
PORTRAITS AND OTHER WORKS