Sir John Everett Millais, P.R.A. 1829-1896

Millais worked on the composition of the painting which came to be called A Huguenot in the period 1851-2. The subject originated in his wish to illustrate Tennyson’s poem ‘Circumstance’ – which describes ‘two lovers whispering by a garden wall’. Holman Hunt encouraged Millais to provide a specific historical setting for the composition. Thus, Millais decided to set the subject in sixteenth-century France, and to show a Huguenot refusing to wear a Roman Catholic badge which might have safeguarded him at a time of persecution of French Protestants. Meyerbeer’s opera Les Huguenots, regularly performed at Covent Garden in the early 1850s – and in which the heroine Valentine is seen attempting to bind a white scarf around her Protestant lover’s arm – seems to have been the immediate inspiration for the subject as treated by Millais. The finished painting, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1852, is now in the Makins collection.

The present drawing is one of a number of preparatory designs for A Huguenot. What seems to be the first in the sequence is in the collection of Liverpool City Libraries, and shows the two figures alone in a landscape, facing one another, and with her hands in his. Five further sketches, of which the present is the fourth, are reproduced in J.G. Millais’ biography of his father. These show different possible treatments of the subject, including on one occasion an arrangement which involved three or four extra figures – presumably intended as monks or priests – and with the lovers centrally positioned and facing the spectator. However, in the present simpler and more immediately legible treatment only one subsidiary figure remains, the sinister onlooker in the right-hand background. Of the central couple, the Huguenot himself is placed on the left side – as he had been in all the previous sketches, with his lover leaning her body against him and with her right arm around his neck. In the last sketch, as in the finished painting, the composition is turned around to show the male figure on the right side.

CSN