My Second Sermon

My Second Sermon, painted in 1864 and exhibited at the Royal Academy, was Millais's sequel to My First Sermon (1863), both depicting his daughter Effie listening to a church sermon. The first painting showed her upright and attentive; the second shows her asleep — overcome by the length or dullness of the preacher's sermon — in a comic commentary on the gap between religious obligation and human capacity for sustained attention. The paintings were enormously popular, reproduced as engravings and widely purchased, and the Archbishop of Canterbury famously used the second painting in a sermon about the obligations of preachers to hold their congregations' attention. Millais's daughter Effie posed for both works, giving them an additional biographical warmth. Birmingham Museums Trust holds the second painting as an outstanding example of Millais's capacity for accessible, warmly humorous genre subjects with an undertone of social commentary.

The sleeping child presented specific technical challenges — capturing the quality of unconsciousness in a face that is normally expressive — and Millais resolves this through the characteristic relaxation of sleeping features: slightly parted lips, the particular looseness of closed eyes, and the natural slumping of a small body against the pew. The fur-trimmed coat of the church-going child is rendered with material precision.