A Flood

A Flood, painted in 1870 and held at Manchester Art Gallery, depicts a scene of natural disaster — rising floodwaters threatening a domestic scene — that allowed Millais to combine his skill at narrative tension with the observation of natural phenomena. Flooding was a real and recurrent threat in Victorian Britain, particularly in areas near rivers that were prone to inundation, and the subject carried immediate social resonance. The image of a family — particularly a mother with children — threatened by rising water is a powerful archetype that Millais deploys with characteristic directness. Manchester Art Gallery's Victorian collection is one of the most important in Britain, and A Flood represents the collection's holdings of Millais's narrative work at its most dramatically intense — a departure from the gentle domestic subjects that more typically occupied his later career.

The challenge of this subject is rendering the specific visual and emotional quality of rising water in a domestic interior — the combination of immediate physical threat and the disruption of everything familiar. Millais uses the grey-green quality of floodwater, its opacity and eeriness in an interior context, to create a mood of genuine menace. The figures are arranged to convey both physical danger and the human instinct to protect and comfort.