"The Crawley Family" by John Everett Millais

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The Crawley Family

John Everett Millais

1860

Watercolour over pencil on paper

25 cm h x 17.50 cm w (9 3/4 in h x 6 3/4 in w)

Signed with monogram

From Anthony Trollope's Framley Parsonage with six illustrations by Sir John Everett Millais. First serialised 1860-1861 in Cornhill Magazine then published as a book in 1861. [Since the original drawing would have been destroyed by the wood-engravers, who pasted it on the woodblock, this must be a watercolor copy made for sale — GPL].

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Inscribed on a label on the reverse:

At the end of the last chapter, we left Lucy Robarts waiting for an introduction to Mrs Crawley who was sitting with one baby in her lap while she was rocking another who lay in a cradle at her feet. Mr Crawley in the meanwhile had risen from his seat with his finger between the leaves of an old grammar book out of which he had been teaching his two elder children. The whole Crawley family was thus before them when Mrs Robarts and Lucy entered the sitting-room . . . "

In 1860, Millais made a series of works on paper for his friend Anthony Trollope's novel Framley Parsonage (1860). The Cornhill Magazine, where it was published as a series, was a new monthly publication edited by William Makepeace Thackeray. The story, with Millais' illustrations, was a huge success. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote in letter of 1 March 1860 to George Smith, publisher of the Cornhill: I wish Mr Trollope would go on writing 'Framley Parsonage' for ever."

In his autobiography, Trollope enthusiastically reminisces over his working relationship with Millais. " . . . Altogether he drew from my tales eighty-seven drawings, and I do not think that more conscientious work was ever done by a man . . . In every figure that he drew it was his object to promote the views of the writer whose work he had undertaken to illustrate, and he never spared himself any pains in studying that work, so as to enable him to do so" (An Autobiography).

The Crawley Family was bought by Thomas Plint (Millias, p. 359), an enthusiastic supporter and patron of the Pre-Raphaelites. He also owned Millais' controversial early painting Christ in the House of his Parents as well as Arthur Hughes's Ophelia, Holman Hunt's Saviour in the Temple and Madox Brown's Last of England, among other major works by the Brotherhood. [Online catalogue for the exhibition Master Drawings at The London Original Print Fair 2006: 22nd to 26th March 2006.]

Related material

Bibliography

Millais, John Guille. The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais. London: Methuen and Co., 1900.

Trollope, Anthony. An Autobiography. Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1883.

Created 6 March 2006

Last modified 1 January 2020