George du Maurier

George du Maurier (1834–1896) was one of the most celebrated caricaturists and illustrators of the Victorian period, long associated with Punch magazine, and also the author of Trilby (1894), which became one of the best-selling novels of the century and introduced the term 'Svengali' to the English language. Millais and du Maurier moved in overlapping artistic and social circles, and this portrait of 1882 represents a rare image of an artist turned toward his fellow practitioner. Du Maurier had partially lost his sight in one eye early in his career, and his persistence in artistic work despite this disability was widely admired. The Aberdeen Archives, Gallery and Museums collection holds this portrait — du Maurier had Scottish connections through his family — as a document of Victorian artistic friendship and the overlapping worlds of high art and popular illustration.

The portrait of a fellow artist would have been approached with particular attention to the specific character of the sitter's face — the quality of observation that made du Maurier himself such an acute caricaturist. Millais renders him with the directness and psychological specificity of his best informal portraits, using warm studio lighting that models the face without reducing it to a formula.