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 charm." Other critics have been less kind however, arguing that if the later plays show a skilled and confident writer exploring serious issues of the human heart, "Two Gentlemen" represents the initial, primarily unsuccessful attempt to do likewise. In 1921, for example, J. Dover Wilson and Arthur Quiller-Couch, in their edition of the play for the Cambridge Shakespeare, famously stated that after hearing Valentine offer Silvia to Proteus "one's impulse, upon this declaration, is to remark that there are, by this time, "no" gentlemen in Verona." H.B. Charlton, writing in 1938, argues that "clearly, Shakespeare's first attempt to make romantic