John Everett Millais

'Millais's skill and humour in comprehending both the ease and lack of confidence with which his child models assumed their role was an essential part of the appeal such works made to adults conscious of the otherness of childhood.'Jason Rosenfeld and Alison Smith, Millais, 2007, p.173

The young sitter pictured here on a marble bench in a forest holding a flower, is Mollie Scott, daughter of Thomas Alexander Scott of Philadelphia, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Anna (Annie) Riddle Scott, second cousin of painter Mary Cassatt’s mother. Cassatt advised the recently widowed Annie in collecting and likely encouraged the making of this tender portrait, which was included in the Royal Academy’s 116th annual exhibition in London in 1883, the year it was painted. In a letter to another relative, the painter laments missing the opportunity to see the exhibition: “I am very much disappointed not to have been able to get to London this spring, if we go in August all the exhibitions will be closed & it will be as dull as ditch water. Mrs. Scott seems much pleased with Millais’ portrait of Mollie, she also seems much disgusted with us for constantly writing that we would be in London & not going; she had written to ask us to stay at their hotel but the letter miscarried.” (Mary Cassatt to Lois Cassatt, June 15, [1883], in Nancy Mowll Mathews, Cassatt and Her Circle: Selected Letters, 1984, p. 167-168). 

Millais painted children often and found them to be an especially sympathetic vehicle for his fundamental ideas about art, truth and beauty. Millais had been one of the three principal members of the artistic movement known as Pre-Raphaelitism, in which—along with William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti—he had attempted to lead the reform of English painting beginning in 1848 in favor of emotionally sincere and personal subjects, treated with intense color and carefully observed natural detail. Millais's portraits of children are often infused with a sentimental tinge and represent not only a vision of childhood at the time but also a movement towards imagery that invites an emotional response and delight from the viewer.