Amor de abril

Hughes finished this in 1856, and hung beside it at the Royal Academy a few lines from Tennyson about love that fades even as it's spoken. That's the scene: a young couple at some quiet crisis, the man barely there in shadow with his head bent over her hand, the woman looking down at fallen blossoms with tears just starting. The model was Tryphena Ford, whom Hughes had married the year before he began it. When it showed, a young William Morris bought it on the spot and asked a friend to guard it so no one else could. That friend was Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The picture passed to the Tate in 1909, where it remains the best known thing Hughes ever made.