Effie Gray

Effie Gray (1828–1897) was one of the most dramatic figures in Victorian cultural history — she had married the critic John Ruskin in 1848, and their marriage was famously annulled on grounds of non-consummation in 1854, after which she married Millais, with whom she had been falling in love during their extended time together in Scotland in 1853. This portrait, dated 1853, was made during precisely that period — Millais painting the woman who would become his wife the following year, while she was still legally married to Ruskin. The painting thus carries an extraordinary biographical charge: it is a portrait of desire, attachment, and the beginnings of a relationship that would transform both their lives. The emotional complexity of the situation — and the scandal that followed the annulment and remarriage — made Effie Gray one of the most discussed women in Victorian Britain.

Millais paints Effie in his full Pre-Raphaelite manner of 1853, with intense attention to the specific quality of her features — the precise colour and texture of her skin, the particular shade of her hair, the characteristic set of her eyes. The Pre-Raphaelite technique, with its white ground and carefully built layers of transparent colour, gives the flesh a luminosity that goes beyond technical exercise into something that reads as the look of a man who loves what he is painting.