William Shakespeare Burton’s oil painting The Wounded Cavalier (1855) portrays a poignant scene from the English Civil War: a gravely wounded Royalist courier lies pale and bleeding beneath an oak, his broken sword’s blade still embedded in the trunk, with its hilt fallen at his side amid scattered playing cards and ferns—a testament to both violence and chance. A Puritan maiden tenderly supports him, compassionate and gentle, while her somber companion—a stern Puritan man clutching a large Bible—looks on with austere disapproval. Burton, working in the meticulous Pre-Raphaelite manner, even dug a pit to achieve an eye-level vantage for accurate depiction of foliage, textures, and detail: the ferns, cobweb, butterfly, and decaying bracken are all rendered with extraordinary fidelity. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856 under unusual circumstances—initially overlooked and hung anonymously—this evocative and richly symbolic work quickly became celebrated as Burton’s masterpiece.