Love and the Maiden is an oil painting (previously mistaken for tempera)[1] on canvas by English Pre-Raphaelite artist John Roddam Spencer Stanhope (executed in 1877) that is now in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

[2] Known as one of the "second-generation" of Pre-Raphaelites, Stanhope was among Dante Gabriel Rossetti's mural-painting party at the Oxford Union in 1857, together with Arthur Hughes, John Hungerford Pollen, Valentine Prinsep, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris.

[3] This painting is considered one of Stanhope's best, and represents two radically different artistic phases of his life.

Although he began as fervently Pre-Raphaelite in outlook, Stanhope was deeply attracted by the Aesthetic movement during the 1860s.

Its presence in the 1877 exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery — Aestheticism's most famous exposé — demonstrates his adherence to the latter movement, whereas the painting's similarity to the work of Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti - the group of dancing women in the background are similar to those portrayed by Rossetti in The Bower Meadow (1871–72) - betray Stanhope's Pre-Raphaelite background.