Juliet has fallen in love with the handsome stranger who has appeared, masked, at her father's ball. She asks her nurse if she knows who he is and is told that he is Romeo, whose family, the Montagues, are deadly enemies of her own family, the Cupulets.

The picture is an early work by Hook, showing the strong influence of Venetian painting and being very close in style to the work of the artist's friend and fellow Royal Academy student F.R. Pickersgill. In 1846 Hook was awarded the RA travelling scholarship, and he spent the next three years in Italy, visiting Venice and studying the Venetian masters. Many of the pictures he painted on his return reflect this experience in terms of both subject matter and style; other examples are Othello's First Suspicion (RA 1849), which appeared in these Rooms on 13 November 1992, lot 113; A Dream of Venice (RA 1850) in the Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield, and The Defeat of Shylock (RA 1851) in the Manchester City Art Gallery. Hook never outgrew the influence of his early visit to Venice, although by the later 1850s it was more fully absorbed in the rich colours and sensuous handling of his well known coastal and country scenes (see lot 592).