Art Newsletter 7: “The Blind Girl”

Dear Fellow Art Lovers,
In this newsletter/podcast I take a closer look at a painting that the art critic Jonathan Jones calls a “mawkish, manipulative, masterpiece”, John Everett Millais’ “The Blind Girl” (1854-56), a painting suffused with so much light and colour that if paintings had flavours, this one might taste like fresh squeezed lemonade, or lime juice with coriander, or perhaps even “Skittles” (and that is not just because of the heavenly rainbow that shines against the receding storm clouds at the back of the picture). However, as Jones goes on to explain with this image, Millais “makes you see your own seeing, and makes you think about perception itself,’ and it is this “doubleness” which I love most about “The Blind Girl”, and I hope you will too.

Click here to listen to the podcast.

Two girls, possibly sisters, rest on a bank at a roadside after a heavy rainfall. The sun has come out as the storm passes and the older sister who is blind turns her face towards its warmth, while her younger sister snuggles in her older sister’s arms and looks out of the sun drenched landscape towards a magical double rainbow.

I begin by giving an audio description of the work, and then explore some of the stories behind its creation, particularly considering the role Effie Millais, Everett’s wife, played in helping him to procure sitters and costumes. This aspect of her marriage to Everett was very different from her earlier, annulled marriage to John Ruskin. Effie had very much wanted to help Ruskin write and compile his notes for works like “The Stones of Venice”, but he would not allow her to assist him. While Everett admired and benefited from Effie’s skill in finding just the right sitter, or sewing costumes for the sitters to wear, like the sanbenito, a black sackcloth painted with red demons she created from looking at a friend’s 15th-century wood cuts, for a painting called “The Escape of a Heretic” that Millais painted in 1857.

Finally, I go on to consider the representation of blindness in painting and literature, and talk about some of the novels I have hunted out with blind protagonists – a list of which I will include below.

I hope you enjoy, and if you would like to read some more interesting ideas about “The Blind Girl”, the Pre-Raphaelites, and their exploration of social issues of the day, or about the “passionate” and entangled lives of Effie Grey, Jon Ruskin, and John Everett Millais, then please check out the links below.

As always, I would love to hear from you, and would gratefully receive your suggestions for books I might read, or artworks I might look at which feature blind or disabled central figures, especially if you have found the works have touch you personally, or been very moving.

Until next time take care and enjoy the Spring flowers.

A dark wooden half-barrel with two horizontal iron bands sits on bricks near a white washed wall. It is filled with sky blue and soft rose pink hyacinths with their closely packed, bell-shaped flowers, in a somewhat conical shape and their broad green leaves.

Best wishes,
Lisa and Star

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