#shakespeare

It's watercolour on paper rather than a painting in oils, which explains how thin it all looks. He earned his living engraving other people's designs and sold almost nothing of his own while he was alive. The scene's out of A Midsummer Night's Dream, from what I can tell.

The plants were painted first, outdoors beside a river over about four months, with the figure added later back in the studio — the model lay in a bathtub kept warm by lamps underneath, and the story goes that the lamps went out and she got badly ill. That obsessive outdoor detail was the whole point for the Pre-Raphaelites: paint the actual thing in front of you rather than a studio approximation of it.