April Love

April Love is Arthur Hughes's most celebrated painting. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856, it depicts a young woman in a violet dress standing in a bower of blossoming ivy, her face turned away in tender melancholy—perhaps the victim of a lover's quarrel. Tennyson's poem ('Love is hurt with jar and fret / Love is made a vague regret') was quoted in the exhibition catalogue. John Ruskin praised the work enthusiastically, and William Morris purchased it—a significant acquisition by the future founder of the Arts and Crafts movement. The painting captures a characteristic Pre-Raphaelite mood: not tragic, not comic, but suspended in emotional ambivalence, the modern equivalent of pastoral elegy. The National Gallery in London holds the work. Hughes made the natural setting—ivy bower, scattered petals, the young woman's slight form—encode emotion with Pre-Raphaelite botanical specificity while the whole image breathes the ineffable sadness of transient love.

Oil on canvas over a white ground using thin, luminous glazes that give the violet dress its characteristic bloom. The paint surface is smooth and jewel-like in the figure while the ivy is rendered with meticulous botanical particularity—each leaf individually described.