The subject of this painting by John Everett Millais was a young woman from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, who also featured in Tennyson's poem of the same name. In many ways, she represents a Victorian ideal of femininity: chaste, pure, doing a domestic task in the private sphere of a domestic setting, a 'moated grange' in this case. The painting mediates nature through the elements of the domestic interior: note the floral design of the tapestry and the wallpaper. The stained-glass window leads through an enclosed garden or 'Hortus conclusus', a feminine space where fertility and sexuality were safely contained. This was a medieval idea which became closely associated with the Virgin Mary. Purity is evoked by the image of the snowdrop and the scene of the Annunciation in the glass design inspired by thirteenth-century windows in the chapel of Merton College Oxford, which demonstrate how femininity is encoded by seeing nature through medieval art.