Afternoon tea or The Gossips

John Everett Millais's Afternoon Tea or The Gossips (1889) is a late genre subject from the Pre-Raphaelite master's comfortable final decade — a period when he produced broadly appealing subject paintings alongside his lucrative society portraits. The afternoon tea scene was a quintessentially Victorian social ritual, and 'The Gossips' subtitle signals the gentle satirical edge Millais sometimes brought to genre subjects: women at tea as the archetypal setting for intimate social exchange. By 1889, Millais was the most commercially successful painter in England, and his genre subjects were guaranteed critical and public approval.

Millais's late genre style is broad and confident: the painstaking Pre-Raphaelite technique of his youth long abandoned in favor of free, assured academic painting. His afternoon tea scene would be rendered with warm domestic colors — the interiors of prosperous Victorian houses, the colors of afternoon light through curtains, the china and linen of the tea table — handled with the command of a painter who no longer needed to prove his technical mastery. Figures are carefully characterized without the psychological probing of his best portraits.