A young noble woman knights a gallant hero in “The Accolade,” one of Edmund Blair Leighton’s idealized historical scenes. Leighton (1853 – 1922), a pre-Raphaelite who studied and later exhibited at the Royal Academy Schools, was renowned for his meticulously painted, romanticized regency and medieval subjects. Painted with beautiful flow and ripple depicting both motion and rest, long, elaborate dresses were often his works’ focal point.