But the following season brought a larger measure of opprobrium to Holman Hunt. In the autumn of 1850 he had spent some weeks with Rossetti at Sevenoaks, Kent, and there painted the greater portion of his picture for the next year’s Academy, “Valentine rescuing Sylvia from Proteus;” a scene from Shakespeare’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona.” The beech-tree forest background was painted in Lord Amherst’s park at Knowle, and Mr. James Lennox Hannay (who died in 1873) was the model for Valentine. The whole work was characterized by the same bold colouring and exuberance of highly wrought detail, the same rugged unconventionality of pose and gesture in the composition of the figures, that had so incensed the organs of Academic tradition in the previous year. Its appearance in the Academy of 1851 evoked a fresh outburst of official contumely, in which the painter of “Valentine and Sylvia” (as it was ultimately called), was no less severely dealt with than his comrade Millais, who exhibited at the same time “The Return of the Dove to the Ark,” “Mariana of the Moated Grange,” and “The Woodman’s Daughter”—one of the finest combinations of Pre-Raphaelite landscape with the peculiar intensity of figure-drawing and character-study which was a dominant motive with the Brotherhood at this period. The assailant critics again sought to cover insinuations of gracelessness and deformity of conception beneath the looser charge of defective technique. It was at this juncture that Mr. Ruskin, then personally unknown to the Pre-Raphaelites, and hearing privately of their aims and endeavours through Mr. Coventry Patmore, took upon himself to espouse their cause, perhaps with more ardour than discrimination, and wrote, in the spring of 1851, the now famous Letters to the “Times” which constituted the first public and authoritative vindication of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.