April Love (by Arthur Hughes) Card

This design features art by the English painter Arthur Hughes (1832–1915). This is perhaps Hughes' best known work and one of the most popular of all Pre-Raphaelite paintings. It shows a beautiful woman standing in a ruined building. She is stunningly beautiful and is wearing a long purple dress with a violet coloured scarf around her neck. She appears to be sad and pensive. Indeed, the woman is looking down at fallen blossoms, perhaps suggesting the end of spring, and of young love. There is ivy growing up the stone wall beside her. When the painting was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856, the accompanying catalogue contained a quotation from one of the songs in Tennyson's "The Miller's Daughter", in which the young lovers fear the passing of their love: "Love is hurt with jar and fret, Love is made a sweet regret; Eyes with idle tears are wet, Idle habits link us yet. What is love? for we forget: Ah, no! no!"