01 Work, The Art of War, Sir John Everett Millais' The Order of Release, with Footnotes

Sir John Everett Millais Bt PRA (1829-1896)

The Order of Release, c. 1852-53

Oil on canvas

1029 x 737 mm

Tate Britain

Bonnie Prince Charlie (1720-1788) was defeated by the English at Culloden on 16 April 1746 and many of his supporters were imprisoned. The subject of this picture is the release of one of these Jacobite rebels from prison. The rebel's wife, supporting their small child and comforting her exhausted, wounded husband, hands an order of release to the gaoler. The expression on her face is inscrutable. She appears strangely detached from the action, and the suggestion is that she may have been forced to sacrifice her virtue in order to save her husband. The picture's original title was The Ransom and early sketches reveal that Millais originally showed a purse of money being handed over. However, in the finished work he substitutes the order of release which gives the painting its current title. The signature on the document is clearly visible as that of Sir Hilgrove Turner, who encouraged Millais's artistic talent from an early age.

Millais painted the picture in intricate detail and went to great pains to make the scene authentic. Jacobite wears the Gordon tartan and the little girl the Drummond, presumably the mother's clan. The only indication of a setting is provided by the prison door. The faded primroses which have fallen from the child's hands indicate the time of year, and also symbolise her youth. Millais used a professional model called Westall for the father and his future wife, Effie Ruskin (with her hair darkened) for the woman. He had tremendous problems with the child, who, according to Millais, 'seemed so obstinate that she would not do anything I wanted, and when forced, by Westall's superior strength, squalled and foamed at the mouth'(quoted in Parris, p.108).

Millais sold the picture to the lawyer Joseph Arden for £400. When it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1853 it proved so popular that a policeman had to be installed in front of the picture to move the spectators on. The Illustrated London News reported that Millais had attracted 'a larger crowd of admirers in his little corner than all the Academicians put together' (7 May 1853). More on this painting

A founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Sir John Everett Millais was internationally renowned during his lifetime, and his career culminated in his election as President of the Royal Academy in 1896.

As a child, Millais displayed a precocious artistic talent. In 1838 a meeting with Martin Archer Shee, the then President of the Royal Academy, led to Millais enrolling at Henry Sass’s private drawing school in London. In 1840, aged only eleven, he became the youngest artist ever admitted to the Royal Academy Schools. Known to his fellow students as ‘the Child’, Millais won his first RA silver medal in 1843.

While studying at the Royal Academy Schools, Millais and a group of like-minded colleagues including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt established the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the first avant-garde group in the history of British art. The PRB reacted against the prevailing view at the RA, and elsewhere, that Raphael and the later Renaissance tradition represented the artistic ideal. Instead, they drew inspiration from earlier artists including Jan van Eyck and Albrecht Dürer whom they believed to have drawn more directly from nature.

Millais’ early statement of PRB principles, Christ in the House of his Parents, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1850. Intended as a realistic corrective to traditional ‘Raphaelite’ depictions of the Holy Family, it met with almost universal disdain - Charles Dickens was amongst its strongest critics, warning his readers that the painting depicted ‘the lowest depths of what is mean, odious, repulsive, and revolting’. Subsequent paintings such as Ophelia and A Hugenot (both exhibited at the RA in 1852) were received more positively, however, and paved the way for Millais’ election as an associate of the Royal Academy in 1853.

After his marriage, Millais and Effie lived in Perth for six years, and his art moved away from the tight observation of his earlier work to more generally atmospheric scenes like the one portrayed in Autumn Leaves. In 1861 the family returned to London and Millais was elected a Royal Academician in 1863. By this time Millais had acquired a taste for the Old Masters which ran contrary to his early PRB ideals—his RA diploma work was even titled A Souvenir of Velasquez.

In later years, portraiture became increasingly central to Millais’ practice, while reproductive prints provided a lucrative way of disseminating his work. In 1896, Millais succeeded Frederic Leighton as President of the Royal Academy, although he was seriously ill with cancer of the larynx, and died only six months after his election. More on Sir John Everett Millais

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