My Antiques 

AFTER SIR JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS
(1829 - 1896)

Lilacs

Etching
Signed artists proof
Frame size: 27½ x 21½ inches / 69.8 x 54.5 cm
Price: £375

Lettered below the image with publication line: "Published October 20th 1888 by Thos. Agnew & Sons London, Liverpool & Manchester",  signed below by the painter on the left and the printmaker on the right; the Printseller's Association Blindstamp, lettered YPL, lower left.

The original painting is of a young golden-haired girl wearing a white dress with a salmon-pink sash. She holds up a spray of lilac flowers in the folds of her dress. The figure of the girl is set against a loosely painted woodland background.

The girl in Lilacs is wearing a dress which could be seen as loosely eighteenth-century in appearance and casts her eyes upwards with an expression which borders on melancholic. This mood of wistfulness is often found in Millais’s later pictures of children and has been linked to the artist’s sense of loss after the death of his second son, George Gray Millais, at the age of twenty in 1878. These images, frequently featuring natural settings with flowers and animals, refashion the eighteenth-century idea of the romantic child which was still current in the nineteenth century. Jason Rosenfeld has made connections between another famous depiction of childhood by Millais, Bubbles, and similar works by Jean-Baptiste Chardin and Édouard Manet. Rosenfeld makes the thought-provoking claim that there is greater psychological complexity in Millais’s meditative and introspective images than those of the great masters he modelled himself on.