Portrait of Miss Davison

Millais wrote to his wife on 9 August 1865 ‘I shd [sic.] like to get on somewhat with Little Davison as children of that age grow so rapidly' (Millais Papers, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York) while in Millais's bank account at Coutts, there is a record that the sitter's father, J. Davison, paid him 600 guineas for the work on 8 February 1866. The ‘J. R. Davison’ who paid Millais for the portrait was most likely the barrister and Liberal politician John Robert Davison, whose London home was on Lancaster Gate. He was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 1866 and elected Member of Parliament for Durham in 1868. He was married to Jane Anna Wood and had four children, the eldest of whom was Mary Frances Davison (1862–1925), the suggested sitter in the portrait. She was born on 28 December 1862 and would therefore have been two and half or barely three years of age when she sat for the portrait, which was painted between August 1865 and February 1866. Millais wrote to his wife on 9 August 1865: ‘I shd [sic.] like to get on somewhat with Little Davison as children of that age grow so rapidly’ (Millais Papers, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York). Both the girl’s parents died young and she seems to have been brought up by her mother’s sister, Maria Wood, with whom she was living at the Lancaster Gate house at the time of the census of 1881. In 1898 she married George Herbert Aitken, a land agent, and they lived in Warminster, Wiltshire.

The picture dates from one of the most interesting periods of Millais's career. As Malcolm Warner has pointed out, Millais painted children often, as they were to him what dreamy-eyed young women were to Rossetti and Burne-Jones, a vehicle for his ideas about the expression of truth and beauty. He began to explore the subject in 1856 when L'Enfant du Régiment (now in the Yale Center for British Art) was exhibited at the Royal Academy. My First Sermon and My Second Sermon (both Guildhall Art Gallery, London) followed at the Royal Academy in 1863 and 1864, but Millais's work in this genre perhaps reached its summation when the trio of pictures of his daughters, Waking, Sleeping, and The Minuet, were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1867. Waking is in the Perth Museum and Art Gallery, Sleeping, hailed by the Times as 'the most beautiful picture the artist has ever painted, and one of the chef d'oeuvres, indeed, of the English School', was sold in these Rooms on 10 June 1999, lot 13, for £2,091,500, while The Minuet remains in a private collection.

The relationship between Sleeping and Miss Davison is interesting, for Millais must have been working on the pictures if not simultaneously, then in immediate succession. (Sleeping was commissioned by Moore, McQueen & Co. on 28 September 1865 for 1,000 gns, only 400 gns more than Davison was to pay for this picture the following February). Both are essentially studies in white and both hence carry an interesting resonance with Whistler's works of the period, his Symphony in White, no. 1 of 1863, his Symphony no. 2 of 1865, and the Symphony no. 3 of 1867. In the present picture the debt is clearly announced with a 'Whistlerian' Japanese fan propped against the stool, and a Japanese cabinet in the background. Along with colour harmonies of white and subjectless compositions, the influence of Japan was crucial in the development of the Aesthetic ideal.

We are grateful to Dr Malcolm Warner for his assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.