Paul Barlow’s welcome book tackles an ambivalent figure in the Victorian art establishment: at once part of the PreRaphaelite Movement and yet suffused with a late Victorian sentimentality, both the artist of Ophelia and of Bubbles. Barlow’s introduction outlines the regular view of Millais: the critically accepted innovator of the PRB for a decade after 1848, then struggling to compete with French Impressionism, accepted to the Royal Academy in 1863. Thereafter, he gave up idealism for a more popular public appeal, his marriage being a turning point – with a wife and eight children to support, lucrative deals with Pears soap seemed more appropriate than the integrity of the artist. Barlow, however, rejects this view. Focusing on the paintings themselves, and declining to dwell on Millais’ private life, he shows how the later paintings stand in relation to painters like Whistler (with whom he held a ‘longstanding friendly rivalry’) and suggests that the later paintings, quicker and looser in expression, are not a product of commercial haste but of a gradual development in artistic style. In The Ruling Passion (1885), for example, Millais achieves something that is both real and spectral using layers of colour set against each other so that the onlooker can see through to the objects and colours behind. The analysis of this painting is penetrating and astute: drawing on evolutionary theories to suggest Millais’ engagement with science, whilst the dead Birds of Paradise in the painting become ‘marks of colour liberated from the repressive constraints of form.’

Barlow traces a number of artistic and literary influences on Millais, eschewing the largely superficial medievalism of the early years, to see links to Hogarth, Velázquez, Reynolds and Pope, though Holman Hunt, Rossetti , Tennyson and Shakespeare still figure prominently. The sections on Millais’ portraits make interesting comparisons with the work of Manet and, of course, Whistler, suggesting a more positive response to Impressionism in Millais than has hitherto been accepted. Works like the portrait of Louise Jopling-Rowe (1879) deserving to be better known.

This is a very readable and well-written book, nicely argued, and suggesting fresh important interpretations of the works of a figure often cited, much taken for granted, and also much neglected. The book is illustrated with 45 black and white reproductions: it’s a pity they could not be colour, but most of Millais’ key paintings are readily accessible on the internet.

Richard Pearson (University of Worcester)

For more details, see the Ashgate website