As a teenager, Val Prinsep was encouraged to paint by the artist George Frederick Watts, who was a long-standing house guest of Prinsep’s parents. According to Watts, in a letter of 1857, ‘I have … plunged him into the Pre-Raphaelite Styx … I found him loitering on the edge and gave him a good shove, and now his gods are Rossetti, Hunt and Millais’. Jane Shore (d. 1527), the influential mistress of Edward IV, was arrested after Edward’s death by the soldiers of Richard III, and imprisoned in the Tower of London. Prinsep shows her just before her arrest, crouching under a bridge, a hunted figure, her hair and clothes dishevelled, as she hides from the soldiers passing above.