Firstly, a HUGE thank you to everyone who voted for AoM. The fact that this was voted for by the community rather than the normal panel is an extra honour, and I'm chuffed to bits to have won! 😊 Moving on to today's image, based on Arthur Hughes' "April Love". It derives from Tennyson's "The Miller's Daughter", and shows a girl dressed in blue turning tearfully away from her shadowy compianion, seated in a garden bower. The painting was first exibited at the Royal Academy alongside the following lines from the poem: Love is hurt, with jar and fret; Love is made a vague regret; Eyes with idle tears are wet; Idle habit links us yet. What is love? for we forget: Ah, no! no! At the time, it received a mixed reception, but was greatly praised by the critic Ruskin who described the girl's expression as "all a-quiver, like an April sky when you do not know whether the dark art of it is blue or a rain-cloud". My depiction represents my imagining of what happens after, as the mournful girl wanders alone in a gloom shrouded garden...