The Bride of Lammermoor

The Bride of Lammermoor, painted in 1878, draws on Walter Scott's novel of the same name (1819), which tells the tragic story of Lucy Ashton, forced by her family to abandon her true love Edgar Ravenswood and marry another man, with fatal consequences. Scott's Scottish novels were central to Victorian culture, and their subjects were painted repeatedly by British artists throughout the nineteenth century. The Bride of Lammermoor was among the most poignant of Scott's plots — a story of female passivity crushed by family authority — and the figure of Lucy in her bridal dress, shortly before her tragedy, gave Millais the opportunity to paint feminine beauty under the shadow of doom. Bristol City Museum holds this as one of its major Victorian narrative paintings, part of a collection that reflects the civic ambitions of a major English port city. Millais painted this at the height of his late career powers.

The bridal dress provides rich material for Millais's confident handling of elaborate white fabric, and he contrasts its purity with the ominous quality of the setting and the expression. The figure is positioned to suggest both the beauty of the bride and the vulnerability of her situation. The broad late handling maintains pictorial vitality while the face receives concentrated attention for its expression of suppressed emotion.