Sir John Everett Millais, PRA (British, 1829-1896) Il Penseroso

Sir John Everett Millais, PRA (British, 1829-1896) Il Penseroso signed with monogram and dated '1887' (lower left) oil on canvas 127 x 92cm (50 x 36 1/4in). Footnotes: Provenance Bought from the artist by Charles Wertheimer, in partnership with Thomas McLean, 25 July 1887, along with two other paintings by Millais, for a total of £4,000. Bought from Wertheimer by Arthur Tooth & Sons for Joseph Benjamin Robinson (later Sir Joseph Benjamin Robinson, Bart.), Dudley House, Park Lane, London, and Hawthornden House, Cape Town, along with seven other paintings by Millais, for a total of 20,000 guineas (bill receipted by Wertheimer, 24 June 1899, Tate Archive). By descent to Robinson's grandson, by whom sold at Sotheby's Belgravia, 27 March 1973, lot 80, bought by 'N. Peel', £2,400. To the present owner, by 1986. Exhibited London, Thomas McLean's Gallery, Annual Exhibition of Oil Paintings by Artists of the British and Foreign Schools, 1887, no. 30. London, Royal Academy, Works by the late Sir John Everett Millais, Bart., President of the Royal Academy, 1898, no. 167. London, St Jude's School House, Whitechapel, Fine Art Exhibition, 1898, no. 70 Literature Daily Telegraph, 31 October 1887, p. 3. Pall Mall Gazette, 31 October 1887, p. 4. The Times, 31 October 1887, p. 8. Magazine of Art, November 1887, p. vii. Athenaeum, 5 November 1887, p. 609. Graphic, 36, 5 November 1887, p. 503. Illustrated London News, 12 November 1887, p. 556. Portfolio, December 1887, p. 248. Marion Harry Spielmann, Millais and His Works. With special reference to the exhibition at the Royal Academy 1898 . . . With a Chapter 'Thoughts on Our Art of To-Day' by Sir J. E. Millais, Bart., P.R.A., Edinburgh and London, 1898, pp. 139, 177 ('List of Oil Paintings', no. 288). John Guille Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, President of the Royal Academy, London, 1899, vol. I, pp. 379–80, vol. II, pp. 286 (photograph of the head in an unfinished state). Richard D. Altick, Paintings from Books. Art and Literature in Britain, 1760–1900, Columbus, Ohio, 1985, p. 372. For John Everett Millais at this stage in his career, at the height of his fame and popularity, there was no more important part of his practice than the selection of striking models. The sixteen year-old Grace Evelyn Palliser, who posed for Il Penseroso, was the offspring of a remarkable couple whom Millais could claim to have brought together romantically. Her father was the Irish soldier, inventor, and politician Sir William Palliser, who developed the armour-piercing 'Palliser shot' and other technical innovations for guns and rifles. Her mother, born Hannah Perham (sometimes known as Anna), had in her youth been an artist's model herself. She posed for Millais's painting Charlie is My Darling (1864; private collection) and, as related by John Guille Millais in the biography of his father, 'whilst Millais was at work on this picture Sir William Palliser visited the studio, where he was much struck with the face of the lady as portrayed. He begged for and obtained an introduction, and afterwards falling deeply in love with one another, she became Lady Palliser.' They married in 1868 and their daughter Grace, the model for Il Penseroso, was born on 20 December 1870. The rest of the Pallisers' story was less happy. In 1882, when Grace was eleven years old, Sir William died of heart disease. He left his wife and now four children—Grace and her younger siblings, Sybil, May, and Hugh—not especially well provided for, although his brother Edward Palliser, a retired army officer, stepped in as the children's guardian. Perhaps Millais's decision to 'cast' Grace as a pensive figure dressed mostly in black had something to do with these family circumstances. He painted her in Il Penseroso and again in a work simply named after her, Grace (1890; Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, New Zealand). Records of her later life are scant. She never married, and most likely continued to live with her mother in London until her mother's death in 1923. At the time of her own death in 1940, aged sixty-nine, she was a resident of Anglet, near Biarritz, in German-occupied France. In Il Penseroso Millais presents Grace as a girl of her time with just a touch of eighteenth-century style in the fichu wrapped around her for modesty. The fichu was associated with the fashion and art of a bygone age of elegance, featuring, for instance, in Millais's eighteenth-century costume piece The Gambler's Wife (1868; private collection). Although the ensemble is a little fanciful, the elements of Grace's look—the lines of the figure, the hair, the choker, the lace evening gloves—are quite in keeping with 1880s fashion. This was how she would have posed for Millais in his luxurious studio on Palace Gate, Kensington, in the summer of 1887. Between sittings the photographer Rupert Potter (father of Beatrix) took shots of the painting in successive stages, prints of which are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. One showing just the head is dated 12 June; another showing the whole canvas is dated 2 July. An undated, presumably later photograph by Potter shows Millais himself sitting by the work, which is now framed and close to completion aside from the hollyhocks in the background. As a companion piece to Il Penseroso, Millais painted L'Allegro (1887; private collection), which features a showily costumed young woman for whom his own daughter Sophie was the model. The paintings take their Italian titles from a pair of poems by the seventeenth-century poet John Milton. Though masculine, the words 'Il Penseroso' and 'L'Allegro' refer not to men but to moods, which Milton personifies as feminine. 'Il Penseroso' is an invocation to Melancholy—bidding the goddess of that humour to bring Peace, Quiet, Leisure, and Contemplation—and 'L'Allegro' to Mirth. When first exhibited, Il Penseroso was listed in the catalogue with the following lines from the poem: Come, pensive Nun, devout and pure, Sober, steadfast, and demure, All in a robe of darkest grain, Flowing with majestic train, And sable stole of Cyprus lawn, Over thy decent shoulders drawn. As commentators of the time rightly remarked, the picture is but a loose fit to the poetry. Grace hardly comes across as a nun, and though drawn over her decent shoulders, her fichu is not a 'sable stole'. A devoted lover of music, Millais would have been familiar with the Handel oratorio based on Milton's poems (1740). He would also have seen paintings by other artists illustrating them. Notable among such precedents were the pair by Charles West Cope (1848), part of the Sheepshanks Collection at the South Kensington Museum (now Victoria & Albert Museum), and a single work combining both subjects by John Callcott Horsley, given by Prince Albert to Queen Victoria as a Christmas present in 1850 (Royal Collection). Clearly Millais did not intend his paintings as illustrations of the poems in the same sense, however, or that his audience should take the titles too seriously. 'Il Penseroso' and 'L'Allegro' had become literary and artistic commonplaces, the go-to references for writers and artists describing a melancholy or cheerful mood—or the contrast between them—whether or not with any real connection to Milton's poetry. Indeed it is possible that Millais painted Il Penseroso and L'Allegro with no thought of Milton, simply as a pair of studies of attractive young women in fetching outfits, and that the titles were applied afte For further information about this lot please visit the lot listing