Il realista proscritto, 1651

The date in the title matters. In 1651 Oliver Cromwell crushed the young Charles the Second at Worcester and sent his supporters into hiding. Millais imagines one such fugitive Royalist tucked inside a hollow oak, fed in secret by a Puritan girl whose own side is hunting him. The tree nods to the famous story of Charles himself sheltering in an oak to escape capture. True to the Pre-Raphaelite creed, Millais painted the bark, ivy and undergrowth outdoors from a real tree in Hayes in Kent, leaf by leaf, so faithfully that the oak was afterwards known locally as the Millais Oak. His fellow painter Arthur Hughes posed for the hidden man.