The dark hair of the woman complements her porcelain skin. This was the ideal form of Victorian beauty described with the words innocent and delicate. She is both captivating and charming. The woman in this painting is at the front and centre of the framework. The background consists of trees and a house that expresses simplicity harmonizing with the portrayal of innocence. The artist, in this piece, has used a bit of the impressionist’s technique to give her background a natural look with the use of soft, indistinct, and short brush strokes.
The colours William chose to put the background together are dark green - used for the trees, and brick red - used on the roof of the house just behind the trees. A very pale yellow and white were blended to form the sky, and the mixture of lime green and yellow adequately bring out the grass with flowers. The woman has on an almost azure blue dress with a white blouse beneath it. The fence is painted with a mixture of several colours that gives it an authentic look, from brown to white to a touch of yellow-green.
John William is an artist who was greatly inspired by romance and classical themes. He blended the two to come up with The Flower Picker. His passion for the Pre-Raphaelite enabled him to relay art with a sense of poetry and literature in this piece. The main inspiration is a beautiful woman, a trend he has previously shown in his other pieces of art. He narrates unspoken words of passion and romance through his pigment choice and symbols that portray nothing short of realism. The hues in this painting are compiled of soft shades that give us the romantic sentiment. He does not fail to give the illusion of movement from the posture of the woman and the clouds in the sky.
William has a classical style in how he paints and the themes he communicates. All these bear a close resemblance to the approach taken by Alma-Tadema. Through his out-of-the-ordinary choice of using the Pre-Raphaelite technique, he shows excellent correspondences to artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. This painting is currently in a private collection.
