Edward Ridley was Head of Art at the Birmingham School of Art, and in 1924 started the Birmingham School of Dress Design, where drawing was the foundation of his teaching. Speaking to the Evening Despatch, he insisted that ‘Anyone who wishes can learn to draw’, but that ‘painting is different, however. A sense of colour cannot be taught.’ During the First World War, Thomas Hardy’s novels were at the height of their popularity, and pastoral themes found their way onto many canvases. Any of Ridley’s five Royal Academy pictures exhibited between 1912 and 1919 - amongst them The Labourer (1913), A Harvester (1912) and children wandering home through an orchard in Homeward (1912) could have been set in the poet’s bucolic Wessex. Here, a young couple pause in the shade of an apple tree on a summer’s day. The scene is sun-dappled and serene – and yet its title, The Shadow, casts just that, a shadow, on the picture, which was exhibited at the RA in 1915 when hundreds of thousands of men had left home to fight in the First World War. It is enigmatic – perhaps the man is about to announce his plans to join up – perhaps this is the couple’s final day together.