After the First World War many artists felt that the experimentation of modernism and abstraction were no longer an appropriate means of interpreting a fractured world that demanded a return to order. There was a reversion to more conservative tastes and to tried and tested modes of picture making. In this elegantly ephemeral portrait by Frank Dicksee we can see the influence of the mid-nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelite movement. Dicksee had long been known for his well-crafted scenes of chivalry from historic literature, but his art is nevertheless symptomatic of the conservatism that took hold in Britain after the return to peace.