John Everett Millais - amy, marchioness of huntly

signed with monogram and dated: 1870
oil on canvas
223.5 by 132cm., 88 by 52in.

Amy, Marchioness of Huntly, was the daughter of Sir William Cunliffe-Brooks, Bt. She married Charles, 11th Marquis of Huntly in 1869. The present portrait of her by Millais marked the occasion of her wedding, and was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1870.

The year 1870 was one of considerable achievement for Millais, and on the basis of his six Royal Academy exhibits of that year he was commended for continuing to expand his repertoire to encompass genre subjects, landscape, and - notably - portraits. The reviewer for the Art Journal opened an account of Millais's works on display with the remark: 'J.E. Millais, R.A., this year appears in unaccustomed force, as we shall in the sequel have to show.' (Art Journal, 1870, p.162). Towards the end of the review appeared an account of the present portrait, which was shown in the Lecture Room at Burlington House, opening with the following words: 'We give precedence to the ''Marchioness of Huntly''.' 'The Marchioness stands in a conservatory, in the midst of flowers; her bearing is easy and graceful; a clear light is thrown upon the figure, which relieves roundly from the hazy background without undue force in the shadows. The drapery is silvery white: the execution on first view might appear sketchy and slight, but on closer examination it becomes evident that the paint has been laid liberally on the canvas; the surface has a texture which throws off light, and gives sparkle and vivacity. It was hard to save the picture from being scattered and distracted; however, in the end all the materials have been brought together and reduced into tone.' (Art Journal, 1870, p.170)

Millais's move from the intensity and scrupulousness of Pre-Raphaelitism, of which style of painting he had been in the 1850s one of the three principal pioneers, to something faster and more dependent upon bravura handling, suited to capturing the poignancy of mood with which he sought to invest his figurative subjects, was thus acknowledged. The sophistication of Millais's art in this period owed much to his knowledge of the British portrait tradition, as exemplified by the works of Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds, as well as his study of the portraits of the European masters of the seventeenth century - notably those of Van Dyck and Velasquez. The portrait device of showing a figure holding a basket of cut flowers, with its delightful suggestion of the woman represents fondness for gardening and the sweet association of flowers, had been used by Reynolds on at least one occasion - in his portrait of the Northumbrian heiress Mrs Thomas Riddell (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne) of 1763.

In 1872 the Art Journal was to defend the painter's increasingly historical style, observing that the 'production has not been worked out for to-day or to-morrow [and yet] it will, like all similar great productions, be esteemed on its own merits.' (Art Journal, 1872, p.152) In 1870, in its discussion of the present painting, the same journal had felt the need to defend the very practice of portraiture as an essential constituent of contemporary art production: 'But why should portraits be thought of slightingly, seeing that many chief pictures in the history of Art by Titian, Velasquez, Raphael, Van-Dyke, and Reynolds, are portraits - and nothing more. Yet to attain this pre-eminence it is needful that a portrait should possess the Art-qualities of a picture as a picture, and it just for this reason that Mr Millais's work reaches high distinction.' Nonetheless, and despite the process of historical assimilation that Millais had deliberately undergone, it was regarded as a particular merit of his work that 'it does not remind us of what has been done before; the manner differs from that of either the Italian, the Spanish, or the Flemish school; it is independent and individual.' (Art Journal, 1870, p.170)

The 1870s was a decade of remarkable innovation and achievement for British portrait painting, with extraordinary new works appearing each year at the summer exhibitions at the Royal Academy and, from 1877, at the Grosvenor Gallery. The self-confidence and sophistication of the British, whose nation was then at the zenith of imperial power and enjoying previously unwitnessed economic strength, are traits transmited in the portraits of the period. Among Millais's contemporaries, James McNeill Whistler, George Frederic Watts and Frederic Leighton, were painting full-length portraits of men, women, and children, and in doing so succeeding in evoking a golden age. Millais's society portraits, and of which the present painting of the Marchioness of Huntly is one of the earliest and most elegant examples, are among his most characterful and original contributions to the art of the Victorian era.

London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1870, no.989;