The Vale of Rest
The Vale of Rest | |
---|---|
Artist | John Everett Millais |
Year | 1858–1859 |
Dimensions | 102.9 cm × 172.7 cm (40.5 in × 68.0 in) |
Location | Tate Britain, London |
The Vale of Rest (1858–1859) is a painting by the English Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais. It depicts a twilight graveyard scene and prominently features two nuns.
Subject
The painting is of a graveyard, as night is coming on. Beyond the graveyard wall there is a low chapel with a bell. In the foreground of the scene, there are two nuns – the heads of the two nuns are level and symmetrical. There is no evidence that they are
Reception
Art critic Tom Lubbock said of the painting:[1]
Graves. Dusk. A walled enclosure. The spooky, looming trees. Nuns. Catholics (in England then, still an object of suspicion). Sexual segregation. Religiosity. Mistress and servant, a power relationship, maybe some deeper emotional bondage. Female labour. Something being buried or exhumed. Twin wreaths. The deep dark earth. Corpses, secrets, conspiracy, fear. It's a picture that pulls out all the stops.
The painting is one of those satirised in Florence Claxton's watercolour The Choice of Paris – an idyll (1860). Claxton criticized "the perceived ugliness of early pre-Raphaelite paintings by exaggerating details from many of their works, including The Vale of Rest, Claudio and Isabella, and, lying in the grass, Alice Gray from Spring".[2]
See also
References
External videos | |
---|---|
Millais' The Vale of Rest, Smarthistory[3] |
- The Independent on Sunday. Archived from the originalon 9 March 2011.
- ^ Suzanne Fagence Cooper, Pre-Raphaelite Art in the V&A, 2003, p.113
- ^ "Millais' The Vale of Rest". Smarthistory at Khan Academy. Retrieved 28 March 2013.