Trust Me is an 1860âÂÂ62 oil painting by the English artist John Everett Millais. It shows a young woman holding a letter behind her back facing an older man who has his hand out to her, as if to ask for or receive the letter.
Millais commenced work on Trust Me, together with his painting The Ransom, in the autumn of 1860.
The painting is of a genre of Victorian painting that came to be known as a problem picture, characterised by the deliberately ambiguous depiction of a key moment in a narrative that can be interpreted in several different ways, or which portrays an unresolved dilemma:
The painting hung in the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1862, catalogue number 269, along with Millais' The Ransom.
The painting was owned by American businessman Malcolm Forbes, and was due to be sold in a posthumous auction by Christie's of his art collection in spring 2003. However, it did not appear in Christie's "The Forbes Collection of Victorian Pictures and Works of Art" auction of 19-20 February 2003, so presumably had been sold privately before this. The painting's current owner and location is not in public record.