Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus was transferred to the Liverpool Academy in 1851. In 1887, the painting was bought by the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. , the painting is still in their collection. Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus is an 1851 oil painting by William Holman Hunt. It depicts a scene from William Shakespeare's "The Two Gentlemen of Verona". The top left and right portions of the frame include excerpts from act V, scene IV of the play. From left to right, the characters are Julia, disguised as a page, Sylvia, Valentine, and Proteus, who is in love with
The Two Gentlemen of Verona their interdependence." As such, the final scene "stages the play's ultimate collaboration of male friendship and its incorporation of the plot we would label "heterosexual"." This is also how Roger Warren interprets the final scene. Warren cites a number of productions of the play as evidence for this argument, including Robin Phillips' Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production in 1970, where Valentine kisses Silvia, makes his offer and then kisses Proteus. Another staging cited by Warren is Edward Hall's 1998 Swan Theatre production. In Hall's version of the scene, after Valentine says the controversial line, Silvia approaches him and takes him