When this triptych was first exhibited the drawing-room scene was hung between this painting and the final scene. The writer John Ruskin wrote: ‘the husband discovers his wife’s infidelity; he dies five years afterwards. The two lateral pictures represent the same moment of night a fortnight after his death. The same little cloud is under the moon. The two children see it from the chamber in which they are praying for their lost mother, and their mother, from behind a boat under the vault of the river shore.’ Ruskin’s comments show that audiences were expected to ‘read’ pictures like novels.