Little Speedwell's Darling Blue

Little Speedwell's Darling Blue, exhibited in 1892, belongs to Millais's late career when he had long since moved away from the intense Pre-Raphaelite work of his youth toward a broader, more painterly style that brought him enormous commercial success and popular affection. The title echoes Tennyson's poem 'The Flower', which opens with the celebrated line about the flower whose blue is the colour of fidelity, and the painting likely shows a young girl holding or contemplating a speedwell blossom — that small, intense blue wildflower associated with constancy and pastoral England. Millais was a supreme portraitist of children, and works like this found ready buyers among wealthy Victorians who prized images of childhood innocence and natural beauty. The Lady Lever Art Gallery holds several of Millais's late children's subjects, reflecting William Lever's taste for accessible and emotionally legible Victorian sentiment. By the early 1890s Millais was the most commercially successful painter in Britain and a baronet; his late works sold for very large sums and were widely reproduced as engravings.

By 1892 Millais had developed a broad, fluid handling entirely distinct from the tight Pre-Raphaelite style of his early career. The paint is applied with confident, sweeping strokes that suggest natural forms — hair, flowers, fabric — without laborious enumeration of detail. The colour is warm and harmonious, with the blue of the speedwell providing the only note of cool colour against the warm surroundings.