Victorian Art & Design
Millais 1853-1856
|
|
In 1853 Millais exhibited The Order of Release and The Proscribed Royalist at the Royal Academy. The latter shows a Royalist hiding in a tree being helped by a Puritan woman. The Order of Release shows the wife of an imprisoned Jacobite, with their child in her arms, bringing him the order releasing him from prison. It was so popular that a policeman had to protect it from the crowds. |
The model for the Jacobite's wife was Ruskin's wife Effie. She fell in love with Millais in 1853 when he was painting a portrait of Ruskin, by the waterfall at Glenfinlas. In 1854 her marriage to Ruskin was annulled and in 1855 she married Millais.
In 1855 Millais exhibited The Rescue. It shows a fireman rescuing a child from a burning building. In 1856 he sent L'Enfant du Regiment to the Academy. This shows a girl, covered by a soldier's coat, sleeping on a medieval tomb, which is copied from one at the church at Winchelsea in Sussex.
Millais also exhibited The Blind Girl and Autumn Leaves in 1856.
The landscape
background of The Blind Girl shows Winchelsea but the
foreground and the two girls were painted in Scotland as Millais lived there,
near Effie's parents, after his marriage to her. Autumn
Leaves shows four girls burning leaves on a bonfire. The models
were Effie's two sisters and the two Scots girls seen in The Blind Girl.
Ruskin said that Autumn Leaves was 'the most poetical work the painter
has yet conceived'.
Holman Hunt
Pre-Raphaelites
in Art Galleries
Books
on the Pre-Raphaelites D.G.
Rossetti
