Room 6: Portraits

By the 1870s Millais was the most successful artist in Britain, earning an impressive £30,000 annually and gaining international stature through exposure at a succession of World’s Fairs. In 1877 he moved from Cromwell Place to Palace Gate where, in a specially designed commodious studio, he expanded his portrait practice and his claim to be the painter of the Empire, despite a notable absence of many royal commissions. His overall output was extraordinary – in 1881, for example, he showed eight works at the Royal Academy, and nearby on Bond Street two at the rival Grosvenor Gallery, and nineteen in a novel solo exhibition at the Fine Art Society. Portraiture was both the engine of his prosperity and a marker of his artistic success. It allowed him to spend much of the autumn and winter in increasingly lavish rented lodges in Perthshire and to support his family of eight children in fine style.

Millais’s sitters included Britain’s eminent and powerful politicians, poets and writers, his female artistic friends whom he often painted as gifts, and members of the rising middle class who looked to traditions from the past to enhance their social standing. In their fashion sense, drama, lighting, energetic gazes, and evocative technique based on a study of earlier artists, Millais’s portraits successfully captured this period when the British Empire was at its most extensive and apparently unassailable.

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John Everett Millais
The Marchioness of Huntly 1870
Oil on canvas
Lent from a private collection

Amy Cunliffe-Brooks was the daughter of the Conservative MP for East Cheshire, William Cunliffe-Brooks, a banker. This full-length portrait, Millais’s largest, commemorated her wedding to Charles Gordon, Marquess of Huntly. She is in a conservatory in a fashionable lace-trimmed dress with a formal neckline embellished with a choker with pearl pendant and earrings. Here Millais blended the eighteenth century tradition of Reynolds and Gainsborough with a brightened Aestheticist tonality.

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John Everett Millais
Hearts are Trumps: Portraits of Elizabeth, Diana, and Mary, Daughters of Walter Armstrong, Esq. 1872
Oil on canvas
Tate. Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest, 1945
view this work in the Collection

This picture represents Millais at the forefront of the eighteenth-century revival, as it is a modern recasting of Reynolds’s image of three sisters of marriageable age, The Ladies Waldegrave. It also shows the collector and merchant Armstrong’s desire to elevate his line in society through traditional references, such as the echoes of eighteenth-century style in the fashionable costumes. The title refers not just to playing cards, but also to hoped-for suitors to claim these young girls’ hearts.

Find out more about Hearts are Trumps painting conservation work in focus

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John Everett Millais
Louise Jopling 1879
Oil on canvas
Lent by the National Portrait Gallery, London. Purchased with help from The Art Fund and the Heritage Lottery Fund, 2002

Born to a Manchester railway contractor, Louise studied art in Paris in 1867, worked in painting and illustration, and married the watercolourist Joseph Jopling, a great friend of Millais’s. The dress came from Paris, and Millais’s tone and vivacious style resemble that of French artists such as Manet, and led the way for the Continental manner of Sargent – marked by fluid brushwork, attractive poses and costumes, and sharp observations of personality and social position – to succeed in England.

“Millais’ family had already gone to Scotland, where he was to join them later on, so that he and I had the place entirely to ourselves. I arrived there about 10.30, stood until lunch-time, and then had about another hour after. It took him exactly five days… Rather a deplorable thing happened to me, however. Of course I naturally made my expression as charming as I possibly could, and on the third day it was just delightful in the portrait. An imperceptible smile was on the lips, and in the eyes shone a tender, soft expression. I was more than satisfied. We commenced talking about other things, and, alas, I forgot to keep my designedly beautiful expression, for our subject was something that made me feel very indignant, and suddenly Millais said: "Oh, we mustn’t go on talking like this!" and looked doubtfully at me, and doubtfully at the picture. Down I jumped off the model table, and ran to look at it. All its beautiful expression had vanished, and in its place had come the look that I must have had – a defiant, rather hard one… Still, perhaps it is as well, for no doubt the face gained in character, and perhaps, to live with, is better than a sugary-sweet expression.”

Louise Jopling describes sitting for Millais
in her Twenty Years of My Life: 1867 to 1887, 1925

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John Everett Millais
Mrs. Bischoffsheim 1872-3
Oil on canvas
Tate. Presented by Lady Fitzgerald, 1944
view this work in the Collection

A daughter of the Hapsburg court jeweller in Vienna, Clarissa Biedermann married the banker Henry Louis Bischoffsheim, settling in at Bute House, South Audley Street, London. Her dress was calculated to fit in with the eighteenth-century décor of their house. Described as ‘the beau ideal of a fashionable grande dame’, she was one of Millais’s many powerful Jewish sitters in the period, who successfully channelled his artistic dominance in assimilating themselves into English society.

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John Everett Millais
A Jersey Lily 1877-8
Oil on canvas
Lent by St Helier (Barreau Le Maistre Gallery) Jersey Heritage Trust

The rage of London society, Lillie Langtry, like Millais, was from Jersey. She wears the mourning outfit she made famous at her first society party and holds the Guernsey variant of the title’s flower that became her nickname. The intentionally stiff depiction recalls both classical statuary and a certain shy reserve in the future actress, who was not yet twenty-five. Most extraordinary are Langtry’s iridescent green eyes, an effect visible even in black and white photos.

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John Everett Millais
Effie Millais about 1873-4
Oil on canvas
Lent by Perth Museums & Art Gallery, Perth & Kinross Council, Scotland. Purchased with help from The Art Fund

Millais’s only life-sized portrait of his wife shows her holding the Cornhill Magazine – a replacement for eight-year-old John Guille Millais who originally sat on her lap. She points to an image of a thresher on the cover, and stares directly out at the viewer, or painter, forming a marital in-joke, representing her role as his manager in Millais’s work, and the frequency with which she pushed him to complete pictures and begin new ones.

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John Everett Millais
Portrait of the Painter 1880
Oil on canvas
Lent by the Galleria degli Uffizi, Collezione degli Autoritratti, Florence

Fellow artist Frederic Leighton suggested this commission from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, for their collection of artist selfportraits. Millais shows himself at work, with a palette tucked in the nook of his left arm, brushes gripped through the bow, and a metal thinning pot clipped upon the near edge. This portrait hung with those of Velázquez, Bernini and Dürer, an exceptional honour for a living artist.

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John Everett Millais
George Gray Millais 1876
Oil on canvas
Lent by the Geoffroy Richard Everett Millais Collection

This is one of a series of oval portraits Millais made of his children in this period, possibly in emulation of Gainsborough’s images of the offspring of George III in Windsor Castle. George was Millais’s second son and was a student at Cambridge when he contracted the typhoid fever that killed him two years after sitting for this painting.

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John Everett Millais
A Penny for her Thoughts 1879
Etching on paper
Ilustrated in A Series of Twenty-One Etchings, published for the Etching Club, London 1879 Lent from the Geoffroy Richard Everett Millais Collection

Here Millais leaves the viewer to construct the narrative; the title and the woman’s thoughtful gaze are the only suggestions for its subject. The fashionable day dress with bustle and train, white lace ruffle cuffs and high collar indicate Millais’s preoccupation with the aesthetics of fashion. The model may be the artist’s second daughter Mary Hunt Millais and the background based on Kensington Gardens and the Long Water, close to Millais’s new home in Palace Gate.

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John Everett Millais
Thomas Carlyle 1877
Oil on canvas
Lent by the National Portrait Gallery, London

This unfinished picture of the Scottish writer, historian and social critic reveals Millais’s working method, proceeding on the canvas without underdrawing but instead outlining with dark strokes of paint, as evident in the hands. Backgrounds would be worked up from thin, opaque and increasingly dark layers or glazes.

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John Everett Millais
The Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, MP 1878-9
Oil on canvas
Lent by the National Portrait Gallery, London

Millais’s portrait of the Liberal politician shows him, as in that of Disraeli nearby, without identifying attributes of office – only his face conveys his identity. Completed one year before Gladstone would begin his second term as Prime Minister, the suggestive nature of the picture contrasted with more common and widely available photographic images of the sitter and is elevated through a lack of polish gleaned from studying Frans Hals and Velázquez.

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John Everett Millais
Benjamin Disraeli, The Earl of Beaconsfield, KG 1881
Oil on canvas
Lent by the National Portrait Gallery, London

The first Conservative politician Millais painted, Disraeli wrote, ‘I am a very bad sitter, but will not easily forego my chance of being known to posterity by your illustrious pencil’. His crossed arms might suggest defensiveness following political defeat and illness. He died one month after posing and, after Queen Victoria sent Millais photographs to make his expression less dour, the picture was exhibited at the last minute at the Royal Academy, draped in black crepe.

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John Everett Millais
Alfred Tennyson 1881
Oil on canvas
Lent by National Museums Liverpool, Lady Lever Art Gallery

Millais had been reading the Poet Laureate’s work and producing paintings, drawings and illustrations from his poems since his early career. This remarkably direct and unsympathetic portrait shows the seventy-one year old Tennyson in his trademark cloak and hat.

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John Everett Millais
Henry Irving, Esq 1883
Oil on canvas
Lent by The Garrick Club

Henry Irving, the great Victorian actor, was manager of the Lyceum Theatre and a member of the Garrick Club, to which Millais (also a member) donated this portrait. Thomas Oldham Barlow, Millais’s friend and engraver of many of his pictures, provided the extraordinary frame which features the Garrick crest and motto reading ‘All the World’s a Stage’ surrounding a globe, a reference to the early membership of the club being largely actors.

Room 7