Harold Speed’s painting of a scene from the ancient story of Daphnis and Chloe was shown at the Royal Academy in 1924, in the same year that George Moore published his celebrated new translation of it from the Greek. Written by Longus in the Second Century AD, the story tells of a boy and a girl, unrelated, who are both abandoned at birth. A goatherd discovers Daphnis and raises him as his own, while a shepherd does the same for Chloe. The children grow up together and eventually fall in love, but in their innocence they struggle with their desire for each other. A critic wrote that ‘the palm of honour should be awarded to Mr Harold Speed for his Daphnis and Chloe’, a ‘charming pastoral scene, representing a youth and a maiden, not too nude, in the first flush of youth [...] Every bit of the picture is honest and reticent. The figures, the landscape and the light in its colour are animated and yet unforced. It is a great picture, designed with feeling and without affectation’.