In this painting Millais consciously set out to create a mood, rather than tell a particular story. The subject is mortality, set appropriately in a graveyard. The title and subtitle, Where the weary find repose, both come from a song from Mendelssohn’s Sechs Lieder (Six Songs). Millais heard his brother William singing the song and felt it suited the picture perfectly. The work evokes the mysticism of religion, showing two nuns, one digging a grave, the other, whose rosary has a skull attached to it, looking wistfully towards the viewer. Above the distant belfry is a coffin-shaped cloud: in Scottish folklore a premonition of death.