John Everett Millais - A Penny for her Thoughts 1879

Etching on paper
Ilustrated in A Series of Twenty-One Etchings, published for the Etching Club, London 1879 Lent from the Geoffroy Richard Everett Millais Collection to the Tate

Here Millais leaves the viewer to construct the narrative; the title and the woman’s thoughtful gaze are the only suggestions for its subject. The fashionable day dress with bustle and train, white lace ruffle cuffs and high collar indicate Millais’s preoccupation with the aesthetics of fashion. The model may be the artist’s second daughter Mary Hunt Millais and the background based on Kensington Gardens and the Long Water, close to Millais’s new home in Palace Gate.