Framed prints of these paintings adorn my walls. They are among my favorites of the Pre-Raphaelite and Orientalist styles of the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries. Although arriving after the close of the Romantic era, in the more pragmatic Victorian Age, these two schools of art stubbornly followed in the footsteps of the Romantics. Their subjects were mythic, exotic, distant in time, space and reality.

The subject of Sir Frank Dicksee's La Belle Dame Sans Merci is from the poem by my favorite Romantic, John Keats, depicting the fatal charms of a fay woman. I particularly like the detail of the late 15th century Gothic plate armor.

Ludwig Deutsch's The Nubian Guard looks as if he stepped right out of the pages of Robert E. Howard or H. Rider Haggard and the realism of the detail in the marble, the bronze temple door, the texture of the fabrics and his skin, are all incredible.