Many pictures are said to be Pre-Raphaelite with few of the qualities to assert the claim. However Milking Time is a picture which could be said to depict the original aims of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to represent ‘truth to nature’. Painted in the early 1860s, it captures the pivotal moment of Millais’ transition from his highly-detailed narrative works of the 1850s to a more painterly idiom. This shift had started at least by 1857 when Millais exhibited A Dream of the Past: Sir Isumbras at the Ford (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight) at the Royal Academy, invoking the ire of Ruskin for the 'reversal of principle' which, in his view, it represented. Undeterred, Millais exhibited The Vale of Rest (Tate Gallery) and Apple Blossoms (Port Sunlight) in 1859, which both show a bolder approach to painting than previously shown. Milking Time was probably painted in 1863, the year that Millais was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy and thus making a step towards a more conventional artistic direction, but it retains his earlier interest in the depiction of natural, pastoral beauty.

The figure of the comely milk-maid wandering the much-trodden path from the farmhouse to the pastures, was based upon a model named Miss Ford. She also sat for the figure of Madeline in The Eve of St Agnes (Royal Collection), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1863. Just as Miss Ford was painted into a picture begun in the previous winter at Knowle in Kent for The Eve of St Agnes, it seems that she was probably painted into an already existing picture of a landscape for the present picture. It has been suggested that the landscape background had been painted at an earlier period in Millais’ career when he more closely adhered to the Pre-Raphaelite attention to detail. The verge of the reaped cornfield, overgrown with wildflowers and fringed on the other side by sylvan hills and red-roofed farm-buildings recalls the landscape of The Blind Girl (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery) painted at Winchelsea in 1852. It is possible that the landscape for Milking Time was painted around the same time, although we cannot be sure. However we can be almost certain that the figure was painted circa 1863 as Miss Ford seems to have had only a brief connection with the Pre-Raphaelites around this time.

Very little is known about Miss Marie Ford other than that she was a professional artist’s model rather than one of the laundresses, dress-makers or household servants who posed on a casual basis for the Pre-Raphaelites. She modelled at least twice for Rossetti, most significantly as the bride in The Beloved of 1865-6 (Tate) being arguably one of the most beautiful faces he ever painted. However, he found her colouring too bright for the picture and the chalk study he made of her head (Bradford City Art Gallery) is rather awkward and lacking his usual sensuality. Miss Ford was also the model for Rossetti’s Belcolore of 1863 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) according to George Price Boyce. Although her beauty only made a few appearances in a brief period of Pre-Raphaelitism she is of the golden-haired and voluptuous type that had become the Pre-Raphaelite ideal in the 1850s. Her flaxen hair and rosy-cheeked complexion recalls the depictions of Annie Miller and Fanny Cornforth by Rossetti and Holman Hunt, in particular Hunt’s Hireling Shepherd of 1851 (City of Manchester Art Galleries) which also depicts a farm-girl in a pastoral setting. Whilst Hunt's painting had given a erotic charge to the subject of the flirtatious farm-girl, Millais made no such suggestion. His milk-maid is a handsome, healthy and happy-looking young woman but there is no sexual agenda to her welcoming demeanour. She represents a more innocent and simple life in the countryside, eschewing the poverty that blighted the farming community in the nineteenth century.

Although the present picture has become known as The Farmer’s Daughter, this does not seem to be a title by which it was known before 1935. It was not exhibited during Millais’ lifetime and we can therefore not be sure of its original title but in 1899 Millais' son listed it as Milking Time in his catalogue of his father’s work. Millais’ biographer M.H. Spielmann, had also listed it as Milking Time a year earlier than J.G. Millais but there is also evidence from thirty years earlier that this was the original title. The first mention of the picture is when it was sold in 1868 from the collection of Baron Grant and it was titled Milking Time and as he presumably bought it directly from the artist, there is no reason to doubt that this was the title that he was given by Millais.

Albert Grant was a flamboyant Irish-born businessman, who is best-known for purchasing Leicester Square in 1873 which he laid out at his own expense and gave as a gift to the people of London. He was made a Baron by Victor Emanuelle II of Italy, but it was rumoured that he had paid for the honour. After the general election of 1874 when Grant was accused of bribing voters with gifts of money, meat and alcohol, Grant was unseated and ordered to pay expenses. His finances began to unravel and by 1876, following several disastrous business decisions, Grant was being pursued by creditors. In 1877 he was declared bankrupt after losing most of the investment of over £83,000 he had made in a railway company. He was forced to sell many of his assets including 185 paintings by virtually every well-regarded Victorian artist - sold anonymously by Christie's as 'a highly important collection of modern pictures and water-colour drawings, formed with great judgement'. Among the pictures were two masterpieces by Millais Christ in the House of his Parents (The Carpenter's Shop) of 1850 (Tate) and The Black Brunswicker of 1860 (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight). Milking Time had already left his collection, having been sold in 1868, presumably only a few years after he had purchased it. It then disappeared for over four decades, probably into the stock-room of a picture dealer. The Milkmaid (as the present picture had become known) re-emerged in 1899 with Agnew’s and was sold to Mr C.A. Barton who had a distinguished collection of 18th century pictures. It also did not remain with him for long and was sold three years later when he sold the contents of his home in Fitzjohn's Avenue, Hampstead. The next owner was John Postle Heseltine, a trustee of the National Gallery for almost forty years and one of the most highly respected connoisseurs of his era. He had a beautiful house in Queen's Gate, Kensington, designed by Norman Shaw and decorated with his exquisite and eclectic taste with fine sculpture, paintings and works on paper by old and modern masters. The Farmer's Daughter (the title by which it became known during its time with Heseltine) was his only work by Millais.

When Heseltine’s collection was sold in 1911 Milking Time (The Farmer's Daughter) was bought by Sir Edmund Davis (1862-1939) who made a fortune from diamond mines in South Africa - his art collection boasted three paintings by Canaletto, the same number by Van Dyck, pictures by Hogarth, Gainsborough and Reynolds and work by more modern artists, including At the Piano by Whistler (Taft Museum, Cincinnati), Paolo and Francesca and Borgia by Rossetti (Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford and Carlisle Museum) and six sculptures by Rodin. Sadly several of Davis’ pictures were stolen from his country house Chilham Castle in 1936, including Saskia at her Toilet by Rembrandt which was has not been seen since. Photographs of the interior of Chilham show that his tastes there were conservative and in keeping with the architecture of the building and it is likely that his Pre-Raphaelite pictures were displayed in his London home which was a meeting place for the artistically-minded. Coincidentally, Davis also owned Millais’ The Eve of St Agnes for which Marie Ford had posed.