Page 10 - Demo

Fig 4 4 4 3⁄4 John Everett Millais The Blind Girl 1854-6 80 8 8 8 x x 53 4 4 4 3⁄4 cm (313⁄4 x x 21 in in in ) Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery Millais followed this extraordinary spate of invention with his Portrait of John Ruskin 1853-4 (Ashmolean Museum Oxford) The Blind Girl 1854-6 (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery Gallery fig 4) The Rescue 1855 (National Gallery Gallery of Victoria Melbourne) Autumn Leaves 1855-6 (Manchester City Art Gallery fig 5) the portrait of Sophie Gray c 1857 (private collection) Peace Concluded 1856 1856 1856 1856 (Minneapolis Institute of Arts) Spring 1856-9 (National Museums Liverpool Lady Lever Art Gallery Port Sunlight fig 10) The The Vale of Rest 1858 (Tate London) and The The Black Brunswicker 1859-60 (National Museums Liverpool Lady Lever Art Gallery Port Sunlight) Thus in the second half of the decade he he merely expanded his repertoire into modern subjects established a a a a a new ideal of female beauty based on realist principles and co-authored the new Aestheticist movement This extensive recitation of Millais’s achievements in the first decade of his production with works that were as popular in in the the period as they are today works that retain their radical edge and ability to to shock is meant to to impress – who can rival Millais in Western art after the death of J M W Turner in December of 1851? Not the artist whom adherents of of the myopic tale of of modernism would select Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) whose production after The Stonebreakers 1849-50 (destroyed) and A Burial at Ornans 1849 (Musée d’Orsay Paris) is is socially charged but markedly uneven and often aesthetically suspect Nor Delacroix or Ingres labouring somewhat repetitively in in their penultimate decades Perhaps Adolph Menzel (1815-1905) that adventurous and wildly gifted German painter or in in the United States Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) the the greatest landscape painter of the the period Fig 5 5 5 John Everett Millais Autumn Leaves 1855-6 104 3 x x 74 cm (41 x x 291⁄8 in ) Manchester Art Gallery Photo: Bridgeman Images 10