Room 3: Aestheticism

Following the struggles and eventual acceptance of Pre-Raphaelitism, Millais dramatically shifted gear in the mid-1850s to pursue a new manner. The pictures in this room reject both the need for literal subjects and the overall clarity and precision of Pre-Raphaelite landscape painting, establishing themes that would concern Millais in his art for the remainder of his career. Retrospectively, such works appear to have heralded the inception of British Aestheticism’s ideal of Art for Art’s sake, anticipating the subsequent work of Rossetti, Whistler, and Albert Moore.

Such Aesthetic pictures often lack an easily recognisable subject and function as portraits, anonymous scenes of abstracted female beauty in a Japanese, classical or even contemporary style, or pictures that seem to have a story but remain ambiguous to viewers searching for a precise meaning. A generally sensuous, opulent and sometimes historically ambiguous style associated with Aestheticism finds its way into many of Millais’s portraits and later landscapes, but subject pictures of this period reveal Millais’s brand of Aestheticism was less concerned with a cultish concept of androgynous beauty, or trends in furnishings or crockery, than in the evocation of mood, poetic meaning and modernised female beauty.

“Full on this casement shone the wintry moon
…
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant bodice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in seaweed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees
In fancy fair St Agnes in her bed,
But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.”

Extracts from The Eve of St Agnes, John Keats, 1819. Millais was inspired by these lines. Millais' painting The Eve of St Agnes was done at Knole Park, a stately home in Kent, with his wife Effie as the model. John Everett Millais Eve of St Agnes 1863,
lent by The Royal Collection

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John Everett Millais
The Vale of Rest 1858
Oil on canvas
Tate. Presented by Sir Henry Tate, 1894
view this work in the Collection

Painted in the ruined sixteenth century Kinnoull Parish churchyard in Perth, this twilight scene depicts a nun digging a grave while another sits contemplatively on the waiting headstone. The yellow ring-like wreaths symbolise the nun’s marriage to Christ at death, but also link visually to the flowers and scythe bordering the figures in Spring. The title comes from a song by Felix Mendelssohn and promises eternal repose for the gift of faith.

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John Everett Millais
Spring 1856-9
Oil on canvas
National Museums Liverpool, Lady Lever Art Gallery

Painted in the ruined sixteenth century Kinnoull Parish churchyard in Perth, this twilight scene depicts a nun digging a grave while another sits contemplatively on the waiting headstone. The yellow ring-like wreaths symbolise the nun’s marriage to Christ at death, but also link visually to the flowers and scythe bordering the figures in Spring. The title comes from a song by Felix Mendelssohn and promises eternal repose for the gift of faith.

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John Everett Millais
Sophie Gray 1857
Oil on paper laid on wood
Lent from a private collection courtesy of Peter Nahum at The Leicester Galleries, London

Sophie Gray was around twelve when she sat for Autumn Leaves (also on display in this room), and fourteen in this hypnotic image of the onset of maturity, sexual awakening and power. In its resolute likeness, careful drawing and paint application, and subtle tones, this intimate picture is one of the most remarkable realist portraits of the nineteenth century.

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John Everett Millais
‘Oh! that a dream so sweet, so long enjoy’d, Should be so sadly, cruelly destroy’d’ –Moore’s ‘Lalla Rookh’ 1872
Oil on canvas
Lent from a private collection, courtesy of Peter Nahum at The Leicester Galleries, London

The Irish poet Thomas Moore’s Indian romance of 1817, Lalla Rookh, was popular in art from the Romantic period. Millais’s evocative female beauty, fashion, and floral accessories are painted with the active brushwork characteristic of his maturity and inspired by Velázquez. His image of exotic disillusionment is as removed from Moore’s imagined East (the poet had never travelled to India) as it was from 1872, and forms a play on artificiality and painterly performance.