Millais: Portraits

John Everett Millais (1829-1896) was one of the most celebrated figures of Victorian art. As a young man, he founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt. In later years, he rose to wealth, acclaim, and social prestige as a landscapist, illustrator, and painter of subject and genre pictures and as the most successful British portrait painter of his generation. This lavishly illustrated book, published to accompany a major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, is the first comprehensive survey of Millais's portraits. It is also a historically important record of High Victorian England, containing the artist's memorable images of such leading political and cultural figures as Gladstone, Disraeli, Tennyson, Ruskin, Carlyle, and Lillie Langtry. The book includes 100 color reproductions as well as essays by eminent scholars that place Millais's work in the context of his public and private life, making this an authoritative and visually compelling study of the artist's extraordinary contributions to portraiture.

Peter Funnell begins the book by describing Millais's astonishing popularity and the artist's public persona, examining his practice as a portraitist and assessing the view common among later critics that Millais's mature work failed to fulfill his youthful promise. Leonée Ormond examines Millais's early portraits, from his precocious boyhood sketches to his magnificent portrait of Ruskin (1853-54) and his paintings of Ruskin's wife, Effie, who famously left her husband to marry Millais. Malcolm Warner interprets Millais's portraits of children--including the elegiac painting Autumn Leaves (1855-56) and the melancholy Nina Lehmann (1869)--as reflections of Millais's nostalgic ideas about the naturalness, innocence, and beauty of childhood. H. C. G. Matthew assesses Millais's portraits of men of power, which include paintings of four Prime Ministers (Gladstone, Disraeli, Salisbury, and Rosebery). Kate Flint discusses Millais's portraits of women, which ranged from likenesses of family and friends to glamorous paintings of the rich, aristocratic, and beautiful. Each essay is followed by its own thematic catalogue of portraits.

The elegantly written essays and stunning reproductions are supplemented by Warner's extensive documentation about individual works of art, drawings from Millais's sketchbooks, and photographs of the artist in his studio. In its words and images, in its scholarship and its accessibility to the general reader, this is an exceptional book about one of the most influential artists of the nineteenth century.

"The essay authors are frank in their assessment of a painter often charged with succumbing to the allurements of fashion; at the same time, they are effective in placing him in the context of art history as well as the political, social, and aesthetic realities of his time."