A Souvenir of Velazquez by John Everett Millais

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A Souvenir of Velazquez
Source: The Royal Academy
John Everett Millais is known primarily as a Pre-Raphaelite artist. Indeed, it was his association with the fascinating and sometimes controversial Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood that initially brought Millais fame. However, by the end of his career, Millais had transcended the Pre-Raphaelite label.

Throughout his long and storied career, Millais explored and experimented with different approaches and types of painting. A Souvenir of Velazquez is one example of this artistic flexibility.

As the title suggests, the painting was inspired by the work of Spanish painter Diego Velázquez, one of the most important painters of the seventeenth centuries. Although Velázquez painted nearly two hundred years before Millais, he clearly found fresh inspiration in Velázquez’s work.

A Souvenir of Velazquez makes use of the Spanish painter’s loose, brushy style. This approach to painting is very different from Millais’ Pre-Raphaelite work, which was constrained by painstaking realism. Around the time of his marriage and move to Scotland in 1855, Millais began experimenting with different styles of art, a pursuit that lasted for the rest of his life. Painted in 1868, A Souvenir of Velazquez is expressionistic; it expresses more feeling and energy than Millais’ earlier works. The atmosphere of the piece is far more important than how realistic it might be. This new painting technique met with some criticism from Pre-Raphaelite purists, but Millais was evidently not deterred.

The subject of A Souvenir of Velazquez was inspired by Velázquez’s many portraits of the Spanish princess Infanta Maria Margarita, including his most famous painting, Las Meninas. The piece depicts a young girl—who certainly bears some resemblance to the princess—in a black and red gown, colors often associated with Spain. The style and decoration of her dress also reference the outfit that Velázquez wore in his self-portrait within Las Meninas, black tunic decorated with a red cross. The child also holds an orange in her hands. The fruit is often associated with the Spanish city of Seville, but in Christian iconography oranges also represent purity.

Las Meninas
Museo del Prado

Similarly, the presence of the little girl in the painting symbolizes the transient and fragile nature of childhood’s beauty and purity. According to my research, “Throughout his career Millais painted children to provoke meditations on transience, beauty and truth.” Thus, when paired with Velázquez’s work, the painting plays with the idea of time and the longevity of artistic endeavors. It’s a thought-provoking piece of art, but it’s also a beautiful and charming painting, one of Millais’ little-known masterpieces.

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