Elgiva seized by order of Archbishop Odo

This 1845 Elgiva Seized by Order of Archbishop Odo is a remarkably ambitious early work painted when John Everett Millais was only sixteen years old, depicting a dramatic episode from Anglo-Saxon history in which the young wife of King Edwy was forcibly separated from her husband by the powerful Archbishop Odo of Canterbury. The work demonstrates Millais's precocious engagement with the type of dramatic narrative painting that the Royal Academy valued most highly, combining historical subject matter with complex multi-figure composition. Three years later, in 1848, Millais would co-found the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and commit to a radically new approach to painting over a white ground. But this early work shows the academic ambitions that made him the Royal Academy's most celebrated prodigy — he had entered its schools at eleven — and the historical seriousness that would inform his mature Pre-Raphaelite paintings. The Anglo-Saxon subject reflects the Victorian fascination with English medieval history as a source of narrative drama. The painting is now in the Birmingham Museums Trust collection, which holds the finest assembly of Pre-Raphaelite work in the world.

The dramatic historical scene shows the teenage Millais already commanding complex multi-figure compositions with assured drawing and dramatic lighting that was remarkable for an artist so young.