Painted for an exhibition at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol. The title comes from Thomas Hardy's poem, After a Journey, about a dead lover whose spirit lives on in the sights and sounds of nature. The girl, Gillian Matthews, was a ceramics student at Bristol: "I felt her face perfectly reflected her sweet nature. I thought if anybody had the right to live on and on, as Hardy described, Gillian's nature must survive. I was very sad when I painted it". http://www.davidinshaw.net/03.html