Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus

Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1851, the same year as 'The Hireling Shepherd,' this painting takes its subject from Shakespeare's 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona,' depicting the moment when Valentine interrupts Proteus's attempted assault on Sylvia — the culminating scene in which loyalty, betrayal, and forgiveness are simultaneously at issue. Hunt's choice of Shakespeare as a literary source reflects the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's identification of the Elizabethan period as an era of authentic artistic and moral culture against which the academic present compared unfavorably. The Birmingham Museums Trust's collection of this work alongside several other major Hunt paintings makes Birmingham one of the most important repositories of his art, reflecting the city's historic support for the Pre-Raphaelite movement. The painting was executed with the intense naturalistic attention to outdoor setting and contemporary dress that characterized Hunt's pre-Holy Land period.

The composition requires the arrangement of three figures in a complex emotional and physical relationship — the assailant, the victim, and the rescuer — within an outdoor setting that Hunt painted with his characteristic naturalistic detail. The figures' poses convey the abrupt physical intervention of the scene while the landscape setting is given the same careful attention as the human drama in the foreground. The color palette achieves the brightness characteristic of Hunt's work on white ground in the early 1850s.