The Pet Bird

The Pet Bird is an early work by Millais from his pre-Pre-Raphaelite period, depicting a sentimental domestic subject that anticipates the genre scenes of his later career when he abandoned historical and religious painting for more commercially successful Victorian narrative pictures. Children with pet animals were a staple of Victorian genre painting, appealing to the middle-class domestic values of Millais's eventual patron base. This early work, predating the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's formation in 1848, shows Millais experimenting with the sentimental genre subjects he would later produce with great commercial success, suggesting his awareness of market preferences even before his period of high artistic ambition.

The domestic scene is rendered with the technical skill that characterized even Millais's earliest work, the figure and pet rendered with careful observation within conventional Victorian genre painting traditions.