Page 18 - Demo

Fig 14 Vincent Vincent Brown Sir John John Everett Millais 1st Bt by Vincent Vincent Brooks chromolithograph after John John Ballantyne 1860s 53 2 2 2 x x 73 cm (21 x x 283⁄4 in in in ) National Portrait Gallery London domesticity from a a a father’s perspective is almost unique Although artists over time had used their own children
as ready models for for their professional commissions – for for example the Flemish Baroque artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) often used his his many portrait drawings of of his his children
as models for his pictures 5 However no other male painter until Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was so so penetratingly intent on documenting his own children
in in in in paint 6 As with Rubens over two hundred years earlier in Millais’s time even the most superficial expressions of doting and loving fatherhood were masked within ostensibly professional activities A good comparison may be Charles Darwin’s article A Biographical Sketch of an an Infant 1877 an ostensibly scientific set of of observations of of a a a new-born which though clinical clearly reveal the evolutionist’s pleasure in in observing his eldest child Doddy (William Erasmus Darwin) four decades earlier There have been many recent studies on fatherhood in Victorian Britain a a a a a a a subject usually demarcated by class distinctions Drawing on on memoirs David Roberts in in in ‘The Paterfamilias of the Victorian Governing Classes’ 1978 laid the the groundwork in in characterising the the approach of men from that class as as remote sovereign and benevolent 7 The first quality remoteness faded as the century progressed but was usually the product of travel and occupations resulting in physical separation from the family Millais tried to keep his children
close to him His London residences expanded as his brood did and and when he he went to Scotland for long periods in in the autumn and and winter he he and and Effie would rent houses large enough to accommodate all the children
His labour transpired in the the studio studio and the the studio studio was a a a a a a part of the the Gray Family home at Bowerswell in Perth where they lived on and off with Effie’s parents from when Everett the eldest was born on 30 May 1856 until late November 1861 18