Ferdinand Lured by Ariel

Millais was barely 20 when he tried something new here. For his first painting made outdoors, he set up at Shotover Park near Oxford in 1849 and copied the grass and weeds blade by blade, the fresh method he and his fellow Pre-Raphaelites were just then inventing. The scene is from Shakespeare's The Tempest. The shipwrecked prince Ferdinand strains to hear an invisible spirit, Ariel, sing that his drowned father lies full fathom five beneath the sea. Millais painted Ariel and the sprites around him a strange, vivid green, so they seem to melt into the foliage. When it showed at the Royal Academy in 1850 one critic scoffed at the little green figure as a gnome. The prince cannot see it at all.