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In his contributions to the visual program, Stone focuses on the figures, their states of mind, and the foreground, and avoids any suggestion as to background, creating an almost flat picture. The sacred atmosphere of "Milly and the Student" has affinities with the paintings of the German Nazarenes in that they share close attention to detail, a rejection of aerial perspective, a self-conscious religiosity in the unnatural stillness of the scene, and an avoidance of shadow in order to show everything clearly. Stone's first plate, depicting Milly and the Student and her brood, lacks focus because it attempts to take in the whole scene. Stone's second production is more effective because it is a close-up that utilizes symbolic poses that convey both the characters' roles and feelings. Elegantly simple, the design (anticipating the manner of the Pre-Raphaelites, reminiscent of early Renaissance art, has foreshortened the daybed (as Giotto has done with the Virgin Mary's bed in his narrative-pictorial sequence of the life of Christ in the Arena Chapel, Padua) to frame the despondent student, Mr. "Denham" and emphasize his discomfort. The text and plate precisely coincide, since Milly is in the act of adjusting the student's pillow in both. We note that the student is grasping a locket which hangs on a chain about his neck, a detail not mentioned in the text but undoubtedly intended by the artist to suggest the source of the student's abstraction and melancholy. He does not look away, towards the fire as in the text, but within. He does not seem to notice that his pillow is being adjusted, and appears neither uncivil nor ungrateful, as in the line at the top of the page. The young man's body language does, however, communicate Edmund's pensiveness: "you have often been thinking of late" (97).

Since the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded at about the time that The Haunted Man was published, it would be a mistake to regard Stone's "Milly" illustrations as consciously Pre-Raphaelite in style. Stone, already forty-eight at the time, was a self-taught artist, while Pre-Raphaelites were younger and were associated with the Royal Academy schools, against the teachings of which they reacted.

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Created 19 October 2004

Last modified 29 December 2019