Millais sat eleven hours a day on a folding stool beside the Hogsmill for five months — the willow leaves you see are the willow leaves he saw.
No washes, no glazes, no sketched mass of foliage — every blade is its own painted object on the wet-white ground that bleeds its brightness through.
Millais consulted plate engravings before he placed each species — dog-rose, meadowsweet, forget-me-not, pansy, the riverbank's actual census, drawn to scale.
The brotherhood refused the Academy's "Old Master sauce" — emerald foliage shadows in jade and violet, vermilion poppies shadowed in deep moss.