Cinderella

Cinderella, painted in 1881, represents Millais's engagement with fairy tale and nursery narrative subjects that became increasingly popular in Victorian painting from the 1870s onward. The fairy tale had been elevated to serious literary and artistic status through the Romantic period, and in the Victorian era the stories of Perrault and the Brothers Grimm provided a rich imaginative resource for painters seeking subjects with broad popular appeal. Millais depicts Cinderella in the moment of enchantment, presided over by a fairy godmother who transforms the girl's circumstances. The Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection, which holds this work, reflects the collector's broad interest in Victorian narrative and subject painting alongside the theatrical culture that also characterises his collections. Cinderella combines Millais's considerable skill at painting young female figures with the warm domestic atmosphere and narrative clarity of his most popular later works.

The subject demanded convincing representation of transformation — the magic that turns drudgery into splendour — and Millais uses light as his primary tool, with the fairy godmother surrounded by a concentrated luminosity that differentiates the magical from the mundane. The paint handling is fluid and warm, and Cinderella's expression of wonder is the psychological focal point of the composition.