The Ransom

At the edge of a wood, an armored knight steps forward to offer a ransom of jewels to the bearded men who face him, his two young daughters already clinging to him in the instant of release — one pressing her face against his breastplate while the other reaches out toward the captors, a hound watching at their feet. John Everett Millais (1829–1896), a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, invented the scene as a costume piece of his own devising and painted it in 1860 to 1862, setting the figures almost in a single plane and lighting them evenly in the manner of early Renaissance painting, with the hard-edged, near-photographic detail and rich local colour of his high Pre-Raphaelite manner. The painting is held in the J. Paul Getty Museum.