Love Birds ("Une Grande Dame")

Love Birds ("Une Grande Dame") is one of Sir John Everett Millais’s so-called ‘fancy pictures.’ Fancy pictures were originally a sub-genre of painting within 18^th century English art. The name was coined by Sir Joshua Reynolds, who, alongside Thomas Gainsborough, was one of the great practitioners of the subject. These kinds of pictures were primarily inspired by 18^th-century French painting, including Chardin and Greuze. ‘Fancy pictures’ generally featured children as their subjects, and while purporting to depict everyday life, they also usually included an imaginative element which gave them a contrived innocence. The notion of a ‘childhood’ had only begun to develop in the 18^th century, and thus a painting that took a contemporary child as its subject was inherently new.

Striving, late in his career, to achieve the same reputation as a painter that Reynolds had, Millais was to become the ‘fancy picture’s’ greatest practitioner among 19^th century painters, and with eight children at home to choose from, the artist was rarely short of child models. Unlike their 18^th century antecedents, Millais’s paintings generally take a view on childhood which is less focused on underprivileged children, though they are undercut with a sense of the fragility of life and childhood which reflected the concerns of his era about a loss of innocence among children. His paintings too tend to be portrait-like studies of single children in settings or costumes gently suggestive of narrative but without actually providing a specific story or message, and they are conspicuously nostalgic – as for example in the brocade silk dress and lace cap and collar of the sitter in the current painting, which harken back to the 18^th century rather than his own time.

Long dismissed as simple Victorian sentimentality, Millais’s ‘fancy pictures’ are in fact best described by Alison Smith who noted, ‘In taking a genre widely considered to have degenerated into something trite and feminine, Millais sought to aggrandize it by imbuing his child subjects with a prescience of mortality but with the aim of giving visual pleasure rather than preaching a moral lesson.’ Emblems of the fragility of existence – bubbles, flowers, and, as in the present picture, birds, appear frequently in his work, and his children’s neutral and sometimes introspective expressions were crucial in keeping both narrative and moralizing at bay. Though at first blush it appears to be simply a sweet painting of a child holding a love bird (a type of small parrot), in fact Millais was quoting directly from the Old Masters in creating the present picture – the pose was said to have been inspired by the work attributed to the school of Philippe de Champaigne in the Louvre, Enfant au faucon – an attempt to monumentalize and elevate his subject matter.

The picture was included in two very important late 19^th- and early 20^th-century American collections – that of George Ingraham Seney, an early donor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Matthew C. D. Borden, a Fall River cloth industrialist known as the ‘The Calico King’ during his lifetime. Prior to Seney’s acquisition, it was shipped to Australia, where it was considered for acquisition by The National Gallery of Victoria only a few years after being painted. In spite of Millais’s concerted attempts to avoid sentimentality and narrative, in a delightful twist of perhaps nominative determinist fate, this work titled Love Birds has been sold on three separate occasions within a day or two of Valentine’s Day.