In May 1850 the Royal Academy in London hung picture number 518 with no title at all. The catalogue gave it only a line from the prophet Zechariah: “And one shall say unto him, What are these wounds in thine hands?” It showed a boy in a carpenter’s workshop with a cut in his palm and his mother kneeling beside him. Charles Dickens saw “a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy, in a bed-gown.” The Times called it, “to speak plainly, revolting.” The painter, John Everett Millais, was twenty.
Dickens’s one backhanded concession was on the floor: “such objects as the shavings which are strewn on the carpenter’s floor are admirably painted.” Millais had painted that interior in a real carpenter’s shop. The scandal was that he painted the Holy Family as if it had really happened, to people with real hands. Below are all 41 of his Christian works in our collection, from a student prize picture of 1847 to the last subject picture he exhibited, each with its story, its verse and what people said about it.
John Everett Millais at a glance
- Who: John Everett Millais (1829–1896), English painter, one of the seven founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 and, in the last months of his life, President of the Royal Academy.
- Born: 8 June 1829 in Southampton, into a family from Jersey.
- Died: 13 August 1896 in London, aged 67, of a malignant tumour of the throat. The Royal Academy asked for him to be buried in St Paul’s Cathedral, and he was.
- Training: admitted to the Royal Academy Schools in 1840, aged eleven, said to be the youngest student it ever took.
- Honours: Associate of the Royal Academy at 24 (1853), full Academician (1863), baronet (1885), President of the Royal Academy (February 1896).
- Family: in 1855 he married Effie Gray, whose marriage to the critic John Ruskin had been annulled the year before. Her family’s house, Bowerswell in Perth, turns up in The Vale of Rest and, his son says, behind the Parables.
- Faith: a conventional Victorian Protestant. His son admits he “seldom went to church” in later life and calls him “at heart a truly religious man.”
- How many: his son’s 1899 catalogue lists about 385 oils, counting replicas and sketches. By our count 26 of them are Christian subjects, and he also designed twenty Parables of Our Lord for wood engraving. Our collection holds 41 of his Christian works: 22 oils, 2 watercolours and 17 of the Parables.
- Bible text: Berean Standard Bible (BSB). Where we quote a verse Millais hung beside a painting, we give it in the King James wording he used.
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“The Child”
When Millais was a small boy, his parents took him to London to meet the President of the Royal Academy, and the great man’s first advice, as the family told it, was “Better make him a chimney-sweep than an artist!” He changed his mind when he saw the drawings. In 1840, at eleven, Millais entered the Academy’s schools, where he was nicknamed “The Child,” and in 1847 he won the schools’ gold medal for history painting with a Bible subject.
The Tribe of Benjamin Seizing the Daughters of Shiloh (1847)
The story: In the days of the judges, after a civil war had nearly wiped out the tribe of Benjamin, the Benjamites who still had no wives hid in the vineyards at Shiloh during the yearly feast of the LORD and carried off the girls who came out to dance.
The Benjamites did as instructed and carried away the number of women they needed from the dancers they caught. They went back to their own inheritance, rebuilt their cities, and settled in them.
Judges 21:23 · BSB
His friend William Holman Hunt found him at work on it, “painting from a Jersey cousin, whose hands were appropriately sunburnt.” Hunt saw a touch of “the Etty cult of the day” in its arrangement and colour, but added that “in other respects the picture showed wonderful thoroughness and honesty of execution.” Right after this story, Judges ends the book with a line about the whole era: “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”
1850: the picture without a name
In 1848 Millais, Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and four others formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Ruskin later summed up their one rule: they would “draw either what they see, or what they suppose might have been the actual facts of the scene they desire to represent, irrespective of any conventional rules of picture-making.” In the summer of 1849, according to Hunt, Millais heard a sermon at Oxford on a verse from Zechariah about wounds received “in the house of My friends.” The sermon, Hunt says, suggested his next subject.
Christ in the House of His Parents (1849–50)
The story: In an imagined scene in Joseph’s workshop at Nazareth, during the hidden years of Jesus’s childhood, Mary kneels to comfort the boy Jesus, who has cut his palm on a nail, while the young John the Baptist brings a bowl of water.
Then He went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them. But His mother treasured up all these things in her heart. And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.
Luke 2:51–52 · BSB
Millais wanted the facts, so he got them. He carried the canvas to a working carpenter’s shop (Hunt says it was in Oxford Street) and painted the interior on the spot. A real carpenter posed for Joseph’s body, “the only way to get the development of the muscles right,” though the head is Millais’s own father. According to his son, there were no flocks anywhere near his studio in Gower Street, so a few days before the deadline he went to a butcher’s, bought two sheep’s heads with the wool on, and painted the whole flock from them.
London was not grateful. The Times found “the meanest details of a carpenter’s shop, with no conceivable omission of misery, of dirt, of even disease.” Blackwood’s Magazine counted “splay feet, puffed joints, and misshapen limbs.” The Athenaeum warned that “There are many to whom his work will seem a pictorial blasphemy.” Dickens told his readers to prepare themselves “for the lowest depths of what is mean, odious, repulsive, and revolting,” and said Mary would stand out “as a Monster, in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest gin-shop in England.” Even Millais, standing in front of it with Hunt early one morning before the opening, when artists could still retouch their work, muttered, as Hunt remembered it, “It’s the most beastly thing I ever saw. Come away!” The dealer who bought it, a Mr Farrer, pasted every hostile review onto the back of the canvas, his son says.
Luke covers the years between the boy in the Temple and the man at the Jordan in these two verses. Jesus went home, obeyed his parents and grew. What offended London in 1850 is what Luke states without fuss: the boy was real enough to grow up, and Millais painted him real enough to bleed.
Ruskin to the rescue
The next spring The Times went for the Pre-Raphaelites again, and on 13 May 1851 it printed a letter in their defence from the critic John Ruskin, author of Modern Painters. Early on he made a confession that did them no favours: “when I first saw the chief picture by Millais in the Exhibition of last year, I had nearly come to the same conclusion myself.” Then he argued that “as studies both of drapery and of every minor detail,” nothing “so earnest or so complete” had been painted “since the days of Albert Dürer.”
Millais’s own letters from that year show what he thought painting was for. Describing a picture of the Flood he was planning that year, a different project from the one below, he wrote that it would have “this one advantage over a sermon, that it will be all at once put before the spectator.”
The Return of the Dove to the Ark (1851)
The story: On Noah’s ark, resting on the mountains of Ararat as the Flood drains away, Noah sends out a dove for the second time and it returns at evening with a fresh olive leaf in its beak, the sign that told Noah the waters had gone down.
Noah waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. And behold, the dove returned to him in the evening with a freshly plucked olive leaf in her beak. So Noah knew that the waters had receded from the earth.
Genesis 8:10–11 · BSB
In his letter to The Times Ruskin called it Millais’s “Wives of the Sons of Noah” and wasn’t entirely glad they had “escaped the deluge”; that same month he also wrote offering to buy it, and Millais had to tell him his Oxford patron Thomas Combe already owned it. A Dr Hesse read the dove as a sign of the “return of all of us” to the Roman Catholic Church, which Millais called “a very convenient construction to put upon it!” Noah himself was in the first plan and never made it into the picture.
A Huguenot, on St Bartholomew’s Day (1851–52)
The story: On the eve of the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Protestants in Paris in August 1572, a Catholic girl tries to tie the white Catholic badge round her Protestant lover’s arm to save his life, and he gently stops her.
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:38–39 · BSB
The critic F.G. Stephens remembered that “crowds stood before it all day long. Men lingered there for hours, and went away but to return.” Millais had planned the gesture in a letter the autumn before: “he, holding his faith above his greatest worldly love, will be softly preventing her.” The critics were hostile, but four years later he could report that the engraving was “selling more rapidly than any other of recent times.”
A wife, a heretic and some terrible nuns
In November 1853 the Academy elected Millais an Associate at 24, and Rossetti wrote the next day: “so now the whole Round Table is dissolved.” That summer Millais had painted Ruskin’s portrait in the Highlands, with Ruskin’s wife Effie for company. In 1854 her marriage to Ruskin was annulled on a suit she brought, and in July 1855 she married Millais in her parents’ drawing room at Bowerswell, Perth. Ruskin went on praising the pictures until 1857, when he called Millais’s change of manner “not merely Fall—it is Catastrophe.”
The Escape of a Heretic, 1559 (1857)
The story: Millais imagines Valladolid in 1559, the year of the Inquisition’s burnings of Protestants there, where a young man disguised as a friar breaks a condemned woman out of prison in her yellow penitent’s gown and leaves a Dominican monk bound and gagged.
We have escaped like a bird from the snare of the fowler; the net is torn, and we have slipped away.
Psalm 124:7 · BSB
Effie said the idea of a “pendant to ‘The Huguenot’” came to him on a visit in the autumn after their wedding, and she described the prisoner’s dress: “coarse sacking painted yellow, with designs of devils roasting souls in flames.” The museum in Puerto Rico that owns it points out that the monk has been “tied up with a rope and gagged with a rosary.” Effie added that the hero was modelled by a young gamekeeper who was “handsome, very lazy, continually getting tired, and not coming when sent for.”
The Vale of Rest (1858–59)
The story: At sunset in a walled convent graveyard, one nun digs a grave while another sits beside her; Millais painted it in the garden of his wife’s family home at Bowerswell and from a freshly dug grave in Kinnoull churchyard, Perth.
Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.
Matthew 11:28 · BSB
Millais heard his brother William singing a Mendelssohn part-song and took its words for the title: “The Vale of Rest, Where the weary find repose.” Punch summed up 1859 as “the year Mr. Millais gave forth those terrible nuns in the graveyard.” According to his son, Millais reworked the digging nun for weeks, until his wife and, in the son’s words, “my grandmother” locked the canvas in the wine cellar. When he got it back, he put everything right in a few hours.
Twenty parables for the Dalziels
In August 1857, a few months after Ruskin’s verdict, Millais agreed to draw the parables of Jesus for the engraving firm of George and Edward Dalziel. “The subject is quite to my liking,” he wrote. “I should make it a labour of love like yourselves.” According to the Dalziels he signed up for thirty and delivered twenty, and the book’s preface says the work took six years. “Each Parable I illustrate perhaps a dozen times before I fix,” he explained. Twelve appeared in the Christian magazine Good Words in 1863, beside a series of essays on the parables by the Scottish preacher Thomas Guthrie. That summer his friend Anthony Trollope was dropped by a Sunday magazine that told him he was “too wicked.” He wrote to Millais: “you can do Parables and other fish fit for their net; but I am altogether unsuited to the regenerated!”
The book came out dated 1864, and the Dalziels later complained that it “did not receive that liberal recognition” it deserved. One man took it very seriously. Millais turned the designs into a stained-glass window for Kinnoull church in Perth, and its minister wrote that he had preached “my first sermon on the ‘Virgins,’” was “preparing another upon the ‘Wedding Garment,’” and meant to work through the window, “intending to go from top to bottom.” According to his son, the backgrounds were drawn around Bowerswell. The designs follow here in Bible order; two of them are Millais’s own small watercolour versions.
The Sower (1863)
The story: Teaching a crowd from a boat on the Sea of Galilee, Jesus tells of a farmer whose seed falls on the path, on rocky ground, among thorns and on good soil, and later explains that the soils are the ways people hear God’s word.
Some fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly because the soil was shallow.
Matthew 13:5 · BSB
Millais puts the parable’s bad soils on one hillside, with birds on the ground, a field of stones and thorns at the sower’s feet. His son chose it as one of the few Parables reprinted in his 1899 biography.
The Leaven (c. 1860)
The story: Teaching the crowds by the Sea of Galilee, Jesus tells one of his shortest parables, about a woman who mixes leaven into three measures of flour until the whole batch rises, a picture of how the kingdom of heaven spreads.
He told them still another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and mixed into three measures of flour, until all of it was leavened.”
Matthew 13:33 · BSB
This is Millais’s own watercolour of the design, almost exactly the size of the wood engraving, and the engraved version opened the Good Words series in 1863. Describing the woodblock, he told his engravers: “she is mixing the leaven in the last of the three. The girl at the back I have made near the oven with one of the loaves.”
The Hidden Treasure (1863)
The story: Explaining the kingdom of heaven to his disciples in a house by the Sea of Galilee, Jesus tells of a man who finds treasure hidden in a field, hides it again and sells everything he owns to buy the field.
The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and in his joy he went and sold all he had and bought that field.
Matthew 13:44 · BSB
Millais made the finder a ploughman, his oxen still standing by the plough. He told the engravers that “the ‘Hidden Treasures’ I have altered on the wood at least six times.”
The Pearl of Great Price (1863)
The story: Explaining the kingdom of heaven to his disciples, Jesus compares it to a merchant who finds one very precious pearl and sells everything he owns to buy it.
Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls. When he found one very precious pearl, he went away and sold all he had and bought it.
Matthew 13:45–46 · BSB
Millais sets the deal on a beach, among barefoot, bare-chested men and a belled donkey, though the Gospel mentions only the merchant. The Dalziels reproduced it in their 1901 memoir.
The Unmerciful Servant (1863)
The story: Answering Peter’s question about how often to forgive, Jesus tells of a servant let off a vast debt by his king, who then has a fellow servant thrown into prison over a small one.
So his fellow servant fell down and begged him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you back.’ But he refused. Instead, he went and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay his debt.
Matthew 18:29–30 · BSB
Behind the chained, kneeling man Millais drew a great domed church with bell towers, which puts the king’s court in a European city. It was the eleventh of the twelve Parables that Good Words printed.
The Labourers in the Vineyard (1863)
The story: On the road through Judea, Jesus tells of a vineyard owner who pays the workers hired at the last hour the same day’s wage as those who worked all day, and ends, “the last will be first.”
On receiving their pay, they began to grumble against the landowner. ‘These men who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden and the scorching heat of the day.’
Matthew 20:11–12 · BSB
The whole argument sits on one open palm, where a labourer holds out his single coin to the cloaked owner. This was the last of the twelve Good Words plates.
The Wicked Husbandmen (1864)
The story: In the Temple courts at Jerusalem in his last week, Jesus tells the chief priests and elders of tenants who seize the vineyard owner’s servants at harvest, beating one, killing another and stoning a third, and at last kill his son.
But the tenants seized his servants. They beat one, killed another, and stoned a third.
Matthew 21:35 · BSB
Millais builds the vineyard just as verse 33 does, with a wall and a tower, and lays the servant among the stones in the foreground. A basket lies by his hand; in verse 34 the servants had come “to collect his share of the fruit.”
The Marriage Feast (1864)
The story: In another parable told in the Temple courts, a king fills his son’s wedding banquet with guests brought in from the streets, then finds one man without wedding clothes and has him thrown out.
But when the king came in to see the guests, he spotted a man who was not dressed in wedding clothes. ‘Friend,’ he asked, ‘how did you get in here without wedding clothes?’ But the man was speechless.
Matthew 22:11–12 · BSB
Millais catches the moment between verse 12 and verse 13, with the guest’s head bowed and two hands already gripping his shoulder and arm. It was one of the eight designs the public first saw in the 1864 book.
The Ten Virgins (1863)
The story: On the Mount of Olives in his last week, Jesus tells of ten young women who wait with their lamps to meet a bridegroom; when he is announced at midnight, the five foolish ones find their lamps going out and beg the others for oil.
The foolish ones said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil; our lamps are going out.’
Matthew 25:8 · BSB
Look at the top left, where one lamp held up trails smoke and no flame. This is the version Good Words printed in 1863; the night scene below was made for the book alone.
The Foolish Virgins (1864)
The story: In the same talk on the Mount of Olives, the five foolish virgins come back from buying oil to find the wedding door shut, and the bridegroom tells them he does not know them.
Later the other virgins arrived and said, ‘Lord, lord, open the door for us!’ But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I do not know you.’
Matthew 25:11–12 · BSB
Rain, lightning and a shut door: Millais drew the parable a second time, later in the story. “I suppose you have nearly completed the ‘Five Foolish Virgins,’” he wrote to the engravers. “I am always anxious to get the proofs.”
The Good Samaritan (1863)
The story: On the road from Jerusalem down to Jericho, a priest and then a Levite pass by a man left half dead by robbers, but a Samaritan stops, binds up his wounds and takes him to an inn.
So too, when a Levite came to that spot and saw him, he passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan on a journey came upon him, and when he saw him, he had compassion.
Luke 10:32–33 · BSB
A small robed figure walks away down the road while the Samaritan kneels in the dust, so Millais keeps the man who passed by in the picture. His son printed a preparatory sketch for it next to the finished plate.
The Importunate Friend (1864)
The story: After teaching his disciples the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus tells of a man who goes to a friend at midnight to borrow three loaves for a traveller, and who gets what he needs because he keeps asking.
I tell you, even though he will not get up to provide for him because of his friendship, yet because of the man’s persistence, he will get up and give him as much as he needs.
Luke 11:8 · BSB
Millais shows the giving rather than the asking: one round loaf changes hands at the door, with the visitor’s dog at his heels. It was one of eight designs that Good Words never printed.
The Lost Sheep (1864)
The story: Answering Pharisees who grumbled that he ate with sinners, Jesus tells of a shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep to find the one that is lost and carries it home on his shoulders, rejoicing.
And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders, comes home, and calls together his friends and neighbors to tell them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my lost sheep!’
Luke 15:5–6 · BSB
In February 1863 Millais asked the Dalziels to “withhold it from the set devoted to Good Words,” because a Mrs Blackburn had drawn the same subject for the magazine. They did, and the Lost Sheep appeared only in the book.
The Lost Piece of Money (1863)
The story: In the second of three parables about lost things, a woman who loses one of her ten silver coins lights a lamp and sweeps the whole house until she finds it, then calls her neighbours to celebrate.
Or what woman who has ten silver coins and loses one of them does not light a lamp, sweep her house, and search carefully until she finds it?
Luke 15:8 · BSB
The oil version of this parable came to an unusual end. According to his son, Millais swapped it with the sculptor Baron Marochetti for a marble bust of Effie. Later the gas meter in Marochetti’s London house exploded, and the picture, “frame and all,” was shot through the window into the street and destroyed.
The Prodigal Son (1863)
The story: Answering Pharisees who grumbled that he welcomed sinners, Jesus tells of a younger son who wastes his inheritance and comes home, and of a father who runs to embrace and kiss him before the son makes his confession.
The son declared, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’
Luke 15:21 · BSB
Millais puts the son on his knees and hides both faces: you see the son’s tangled hair and the father’s hands, one of them cradling his head.
The Rich Man and Lazarus (1864)
The story: Speaking to Pharisees who loved money, Jesus tells of a rich man who feasted every day while a beggar named Lazarus lay at his gate with the dogs licking his sores, until death reversed their places.
And a beggar named Lazarus lay at his gate, covered with sores and longing to be fed with the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.
Luke 16:20–21 · BSB
Wine is poured at a crowded table above while the beggar lies on the steps below. Count the dogs: a big one at his foot, a small one on the step above and part of a third along the bottom edge. Not one of them is being fed.
The Unjust Judge (1863)
The story: Teaching his disciples to pray and not lose heart, Jesus tells of a widow who keeps pleading with a judge who neither fears God nor respects people, until he gives her justice just to be rid of her.
And there was a widow in that town who kept appealing to him, ‘Give me justice against my adversary.’
Luke 18:3 · BSB
According to his engravers, Millais called this design “the Importunate Widow,” after the woman rather than the judge. Both his son and his engravers picked it to illustrate the whole series.
The Pharisee and the Publican (c. 1860)
The story: In the Temple at Jerusalem, a Pharisee thanks God for his own goodness while a tax collector stands far off, beats his breast and prays for mercy, and Jesus says it is the tax collector who goes home justified.
But the tax collector stood at a distance, unwilling even to lift up his eyes to heaven. Instead, he beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner!’
Luke 18:13 · BSB
This is another of Millais’s own watercolour versions. He gives the foreground to the tax collector and pushes the other worshippers to the back, which is roughly where the parable leaves the Pharisee.
The Good Shepherd (1864)
The story: In Jerusalem, Jesus calls himself the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep; Millais pictures a shepherd lying face down in open country, his crook on the ground, while a lion stands above him and the sheep run free.
I am the good shepherd. I know My sheep and My sheep know Me, just as the Father knows Me and I know the Father. And I lay down My life for the sheep.
John 10:14–15 · BSB
John’s Gospel says “wolf.” Millais drew a lion. When the proof came back he wrote to the engravers: “‘The Good Shepherd’ doesn’t require anything.”
Two sermons
In December 1863 Millais became a full Royal Academician. His models were now often his own children, and two pictures of his daughter, also called Effie, earned him reviews from an unlikely critic: the Archbishop of Canterbury, speaking at the Academy’s annual banquet.
My First Sermon (1863)
The story: In 1863 Millais painted his five-year-old daughter Effie sitting upright in a high-backed pew in the old church at Kingston upon Thames, at her first sermon.
Then the LORD came and stood there, calling as before, “Samuel! Samuel!” And Samuel answered, “Speak, for Your servant is listening.”
1 Samuel 3:10 · BSB
At the Academy banquet the Archbishop of Canterbury pointed to the picture while praising art that shows “the playfulness, the innocence, the purity, and may I not add (pointing to Millais’ picture of ‘My First Sermon’) the piety of childhood.” His son says simply that “This little picture of Effie was extremely popular.”
My Second Sermon (1864)
The story: A year later Millais painted the same girl in the same pew and the same clothes, this time fast asleep during the sermon.
Surely I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with his mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me.
Psalm 131:2 · BSB
The Archbishop took it personally. He told the banquet that the sleeping girl, “by the eloquence of her silent slumber,” had given him and his fellow bishops “a warning of the evil of lengthy sermons and drowsy discourses.” Millais’s own note that January was more practical: “I am just going to begin Effie sleeping in the pew. It is very dark, but enough light for drawing.”
1865: a queen, a saint and the devil
By 1865, his son wrote, Millais had made “a distinct advance in the direction of larger and more important pictures.” He listed the year’s work in order: “His first picture this year was ‘The Evil One Sowing Tares’; and then came ‘Esther’ and ‘The Romans Leaving Britain.’”
The Parable of the Tares (1865)
The story: In Jesus’s parable of the wheat and the weeds, while everyone is asleep an enemy comes into a farmer’s field, sows weeds among the wheat and slips away, and Jesus later explains that the enemy is the devil.
But while everyone was asleep, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and slipped away.
Matthew 13:25 · BSB
This is the design of his wood engraving The Tares, repeated as a full oil painting a year later. Millais gives the devil bare feet and a sack instead of horns and hooves, and the 1898 catalogue of his work identified the animal behind him as “a hyena,” with “a snake” in the foreground.
Esther (1865)
The story: In the Persian palace at Susa, on the third day of a fast, the Jewish queen Esther puts on her royal robes to go uninvited before King Xerxes, a visit that could cost her life, to plead for her people.
On the third day, Esther put on her royal robes and stood in the inner court of the palace across from the king’s quarters. The king was sitting on his royal throne in the royal courtroom, facing the entrance.
Esther 5:1 · BSB
The Book of Esther, in the Hebrew text the BSB translates, never once names God, and the painting doesn’t either; there is nobody in it but Esther, getting ready. The yellow robe is said to have been General Charles Gordon’s Chinese “Yellow Jacket,” which Millais turned “inside out, so as to have broader masses of colour.” The novelist Anne Thackeray wrote that she couldn’t help “longing to know the fate of ‘Esther’ …. after she went in through the curtains.” The Bible does tell us: the king held out his sceptre, and she lived.
Joan of Arc (1865)
The story: Millais paints Joan of Arc, the peasant girl from Domrémy in eastern France who in 1429 led the French army to relieve the siege of Orléans and was burned as a heretic two years later.
Finally, be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power.
Ephesians 6:10 · BSB
The Times thought “the painting of the armour … so masterly that it somewhat diverts attention from the head.” The critic M. H. Spielmann, in his 1898 book on Millais, found her “unmistakably a Victorian young woman” but added that “the spirit is eternal” (both are quoted in Sotheby’s 2003 sale catalogue). When Millais painted her Joan was not yet a saint: Pope Benedict XV canonised her in 1920, twenty-four years after Millais’s death.
Bigger canvases
In the late 1860s Millais’s style broadened and his canvases grew, and so did his prices. His son dates the change to 1867, when two new pictures “showed a further development — one might almost say a new departure.”
Jephthah (1867)
The story: When Jephthah, judge of Israel, came home to Mizpah after defeating the Ammonites, the first to come out of his door to meet him was his only daughter, dancing, and so she fell under the vow he had made to the LORD.
As soon as Jephthah saw her, he tore his clothes and said, “No! Not my daughter! You have brought me to my knees! You have brought great misery upon me, for I have given my word to the LORD and cannot take it back.”
Judges 11:35 · BSB
Millais hung it with the King James words of this verse, “Alas, my daughter! thou hast brought me very low.” According to Millais’s son, a real army officer, Colonel Lindsay, posed for the grieving father, and the picture “was the first of Millais’ works that commanded a very large price.”
A Widow’s Mite (1870)
The story: In the Temple at Jerusalem, Jesus watches the rich putting in their gifts and a poor widow dropping in two small copper coins, and says she has given more than all of them; Millais moves the scene to a hospital collecting box in his own day.
Then Jesus looked up and saw the rich putting their gifts into the treasury, and He saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins.
Luke 21:1–2 · BSB
The picture started with a visitor. According to his son, a model who had just sat for another picture “came one morning dressed in widow’s weeds, and begged to see the artist.” She told him “the usual tale of penury,” he asked her to come back the next day dressed as she was, and when she did he began the picture at once.
The Martyr of the Solway (c. 1870–71)
The story: In 1685, at Wigtown on Scotland’s Solway coast, the young Covenanter Margaret Wilson, sentenced to drowning, as the Walker Art Gallery puts it, “because she refused to acknowledge the church hierarchy,” was tied to a stake in the path of the rising tide and drowned.
Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my rebellious acts; remember me according to Your loving devotion, because of Your goodness, O LORD.
Psalm 25:7 · BSB
The title never names her, and even the 1898 catalogue of his work could only say “Probably in illustration of the story of Margaret Wilson.” According to the historian Robert Wodrow, writing about thirty-five years after her death, at the stake she “sang the 25th Psalm from verse 7th, downward a good way, and read the 8th chapter to the Romans.” The verse above is where she started.
“Victory, O Lord!” (1871)
The story: At Rephidim in the wilderness, while Joshua fought the Amalekites below the hill, Moses sat on the hilltop with his staff raised, and Aaron and Hur held up his tiring arms until sunset so that Israel would win.
When Moses’ hands grew heavy, they took a stone and put it under him, and he sat on it. Then Aaron and Hur held his hands up, one on each side, so that his hands remained steady until the sun went down.
Exodus 17:12 · BSB
Here is the miracle, painted as physical labour. The critic F.G. Stephens noticed that the drama was in the helpers: Moses is “thoroughly steadfast and immovable,” while Aaron and Hur, “though nearly fainting,” each clasp one of his arms to their chests. His son calls it “better known perhaps as ‘Joshua,’” without saying why; in Exodus, Joshua leads the fighting below while the battle turns on Moses’s hands.
Sir John
By the 1880s Millais was painting prime ministers: Gladstone sat to him, and in 1885 Gladstone offered him a baronetcy, so he became Sir John. A year later he painted his grandson blowing soap bubbles, the picture that ended up on Pears soap posters (see the claims below). The religious pictures of these years are few, and two of them are about people who changed church history.
Cardinal Newman (1881)
The story: In 1881 in London, Cardinal John Henry Newman, the Oxford clergyman who had left the Church of England to become a Catholic priest and later a cardinal, sat for his portrait to Millais, who counted it among the finest he ever painted.
Then He told them, “For this reason, every scribe who has been discipled in the kingdom of heaven is like a homeowner who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.”
Matthew 13:52 · BSB
According to his son, Millais greeted the eighty-year-old cardinal with “Oh, your eminence, on that eminence, if you please,” and when Newman hesitated at the platform, “Come, jump up, you dear old boy!” His friend Val Prinsep said it “rather shocked the priests who came with him.” Newman was declared a saint in 2019.
Non Angli sed Angeli (listed 1881)
The story: In a Roman market where boys were being sold, in the late sixth century, a monk named Gregory sees fair-haired boys for sale, is told they are Angles from Britain, and says they have the faces of angels; later, as Pope Gregory the Great, he sends missionaries to England.
Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, or free, but Christ is all and is in all.
Colossians 3:11 · BSB
The best-known account is by the historian Bede, who says the story was “handed down to us by the tradition of our ancestors.” The famous Latin pun, Non Angli sed Angeli (not Angles but angels), is a later shorthand; in Bede, Gregory says the boys “have an Angelic face.” This is a little-known Millais, listed in the 1899 catalogue under 1881 with no exhibition recorded.
Mercy: St Bartholomew’s Day, 1572 (1886)
The story: On St Bartholomew’s Day, 1572, the day the massacre of Protestants began in Paris, Millais imagines a nun kneeling to grip the sword hand of a Catholic nobleman while a friar stands in the doorway behind him.
For judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment.
James 2:13 · BSB
Thirty-four years after A Huguenot, Millais went back to the same massacre. Look at the nobleman’s arm: the white cloth the Huguenot refused to wear is knotted round it, and the title tells you what the nun is asking for. According to the biography, Millais’s son Geoffroy posed as “the Romanist enthusiast,” and in a July 1886 letter his son ties to this picture, Millais wrote: “I am sometimes happy over it, but oftener wretched.”
Back to the solemn subjects
From 1892 Millais’s throat troubled him, and by 1896 he was dying. In between he painted religious pictures again. A Perth minister, the Rev. Armstrong Hall, remembered him asking, “Are you surprised … that I have come back to the solemn subjects of my early years?” In February 1896, after the death of Lord Leighton, the Academicians elected him President. He had six months to live.
The Girlhood of St Theresa (1893)
The story: In sixteenth-century Spain, the young Teresa of Ávila, later the great Carmelite reformer, sets out hand in hand with her brother to find martyrdom in the land of the Moors.
For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.
Philippians 1:21 · BSB
A saint’s picture captioned from a novel: at the Academy in 1893 it hung with a line adapted from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, “The little girl walked forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors.” Teresa’s own account is blunter: they meant to go “begging our way for the love of God, that we might be there beheaded.”
St Stephen (1895)
The story: Outside the walls of Jerusalem, Stephen, the first Christian martyr, is stoned to death after his speech to the Council and dies praying for the men who killed him.
Falling on his knees, he cried out in a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” And when he had said this, he fell asleep.
Acts 7:60 · BSB
Millais exhibited it with just the last three words of this verse: “He fell asleep.” According to his son, he had discussed Stephen’s age with the minister in Perth and decided “he was but a youth,” and painted the setting from a disused quarry on Kinnoull Hill. Henry Tate bought it for the nation before it was ever shown, and Millais kept the news from his wife, “because I was expecting you home and I thought it would be a pleasant surprise for you.”
A Disciple (1895)
The story: In 1894–95 Millais painted a young woman in black whom the title calls only “A Disciple,” and Henry Tate bought the picture for the nation together with St Stephen.
My sheep listen to My voice; I know them, and they follow Me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one can snatch them out of My hand.
John 10:27–28 · BSB
The model, his son says, was a Miss Lloyd, who had just sat for Leighton. The picture hung at the Academy with no verse beside it, and no source says which disciple she is meant to be. His son says Millais thought this pair “amongst the best things he had ever done.”
A Forerunner (1896)
The story: In a wood at sunset, a young man in an animal skin lashes two sticks into a cross; one early account of Millais’s work identifies him as John the Baptist, who prepared the way for Jesus in the wilderness of Judea.
John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
Mark 1:4 · BSB
The Dictionary of National Biography calls it the last subject picture Millais exhibited, at the first Academy exhibition he presided over, three months before he died, and found it “painted as well as ever, though somewhat trivial in motive.” If he is the Baptist, he is not quite the Gospels’ one: Mark gives John camel’s hair, and Millais gives this young man a leopard skin.
Millais died at his house in Kensington on 13 August 1896. A week later the Royal Academy buried him in St Paul’s Cathedral, with Holman Hunt among the pall-bearers, the friend who had watched him paint a Jersey cousin’s sunburnt hands nearly fifty years before.
Seven claims about Millais, checked
“Millais set out to strip the halo off the Holy Family.” Nothing we found by him or his friends says so. His son calls Christ in the House of His Parents “devotional and symbolic in intent,” it grew out of a sermon, and it hung under a verse of prophecy. What Millais stripped off was the idealising; the holiness he took literally.
“The critics condemned it as blasphemy.” Of the 1850 reviews we traced, only one used the word. The Athenaeum wrote that “many” would find it “a pictorial blasphemy.” The others called it revolting, disgusting, ugly and graceless. Millais’s mother, as Hunt remembered it, turned the charge around and said it was Dickens’s article that “cannot be designated as other than blasphemous.”
“Before Millais, every painted Holy Family was idealised.” No. Georges de La Tour painted an old, bent Joseph drilling a beam by candlelight in the early 1640s, and we have it in our collection. What shocked the London of 1850 was less the idea of a working Joseph than the dirt and the “splay feet.”
“Queen Victoria had the painting taken out of the Academy.” We found no period source for this. Tate’s 2007 education notes say the Queen asked for the picture to be brought to her. No 1850s source we found says it was removed.
“Esther is shown putting on her royal robe.” Look again. The robe is already on her shoulders; one hand is in her long hair, where a strand of pearls runs down, and the crown hangs low in the other. Millais hung the picture with Esther 5:1, where she “put on her royal apparel,” so the robe is on but she has not yet gone in to the king.
“Bubbles was painted as a soap advertisement.” No. According to his son, Millais painted his grandson for his own pleasure, the Illustrated London News bought the picture, and the paper later sold it to Pears. The novelist Marie Corelli attacked him in print for the advertisement, then apologised: “now that I know you had nothing to do in the ‘soap business,’ I will transfer my wrath to the dealer.”
“Millais was the first painter ever made a baronet.” No. Sir Godfrey Kneller got there in 1715, though a fellow painter congratulated Millais on being the first in 1885. Millais was one of two painters offered baronetcies by Gladstone that year. The other, G. F. Watts, said no.
How to pray with a Millais
Visio Divina (Latin for “divine seeing”) is a way of praying with an image, modelled on lectio divina (“divine reading”), the old monastic way of praying slowly through Scripture. Try it with Christ in the House of His Parents (1849–50).
- Look. Stay with the picture for a minute before you think about it. Find the boy’s hand, then notice who is closest to him.
- Meditate. Read Luke 2:51 slowly: “Then He went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them. But His mother treasured up all these things in her heart.” What is Mary keeping in her heart here?
- Pray. Tell God plainly where you are hurt right now, in the ordinary place where you work, and ask for his comfort there.
- Contemplate. Sit quietly with the thought that the Son of God grew up in a working family, among tools and wood shavings, and that your ordinary life is not too ordinary for him.
Frequently asked questions
- Who was John Everett Millais?
- John Everett Millais (1829–1896) was an English painter who co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, became one of the best-known painters of Victorian England, was made a baronet in 1885 and died as President of the Royal Academy. He is best known for Ophelia and Bubbles, and among Bible paintings for Christ in the House of His Parents.
- What is Millais’s most famous religious painting?
- Christ in the House of His Parents (1849–50), in the collection of Tate, London. It was his most notorious religious picture, attacked by The Times, Blackwood’s, The Athenaeum and Charles Dickens when it was shown in 1850.
- Why was Christ in the House of His Parents so controversial?
- Because it showed the Holy Family with dirt, bare feet and a cut hand in a real carpenter’s shop, when Victorian viewers expected holy figures to be idealised. The Times complained of “misery, of dirt, of even disease,” and Blackwood’s counted “splay feet, puffed joints, and misshapen limbs.”
- Was John Everett Millais religious?
- Yes, in a conventional, unfussy way. As a young man he went to church and read the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles, and he wrote that a painting could have “this one advantage over a sermon.” His son calls him “at heart a truly religious man,” and admits that in later life he “seldom went to church.” He married into a Scottish Presbyterian family and was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral.
- How many Bible paintings did Millais paint?
- By our count about 26 of the roughly 385 oils in his son’s 1899 catalogue (counting replicas and sketches) have Christian subjects, from student works of the late 1840s to A Forerunner (1896): mostly Bible scenes, plus a few saints and moments from church history. He also designed the twenty Parables of Our Lord (1864) and made a few Christian watercolours. Our collection holds 41 of these works.
- What are Millais’s Parables of Our Lord?
- A set of twenty drawings of Jesus’s parables that Millais made between 1857 and 1863 for the engravers George and Edward Dalziel. Twelve appeared first in the magazine Good Words in 1863, and all twenty were published as a book dated 1864. He said he drew each one “perhaps a dozen times” before he settled on it.
- Where can I see Millais’s Bible paintings?
- Tate in London has Christ in the House of His Parents, The Vale of Rest, Mercy, St Stephen and A Disciple. Most of the others are in public collections: the Ashmolean in Oxford, the Guildhall Art Gallery in London, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, Manchester Art Gallery, National Museum Cardiff, Glasgow Museums, Aberdeen Art Gallery and Brighton & Hove Museums. The National Portrait Gallery’s Cardinal Newman is shown at Arundel Castle, the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico has The Escape of a Heretic, and the Met in New York owns a full set of the Parables prints. Four are in private collections and The Girlhood of St Theresa is untraced, so check that a work is on view before you travel.
Play a Millais
All 41 works in this article are playable as web puzzles in our Open Gallery. Here are eight places to begin:
Continue with Visio Divina
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