However, the portrayal of tense relationships disrupted by historical dramas was a continuation of the theme of A Huguenot and The Proscribed Royalist, 1651.

While working on the painting, Millais began to develop a friendship with Effie, the wife of his principal supporter, the critic John Ruskin.

A study for the painting has a drawing of her head on one side and an image of a man kneeling in supplication to a woman on the other, labelled "accepted."

The title of the painting was adopted for the 1947 book The Order of Release by William Milbourne James about the love triangle, and also of a radio play about it broadcast in 1998.

[2] The painting of the picture is dramatised onstage in the play Mrs Ruskin (2003) by Kim Morrissey,[3] and in the TV series Desperate Romantics (2009).