The Rescue by John Everett Millais (Interpretation and Analysis)

The Rescue
Source: Google Arts & Culture

I’ve decided that this week is going to be John Everett Millais week on this blog. In celebration of Millais’ work, I’m going to be sharing one of his paintings each day, and today I want to look at one of his most famous and dramatic paintings: The Rescue.

The Rescue, also known as The Fireman, dates to the end of Millais’ Pre-Raphaelite period. Shortly after The Rescue was exhibited, Millais married Effie Gray and moved to Scotland, two events that coincide with a major shift in his artistic style. However, The Rescue is also unique in Millais’ oeuvre in that it is one of the first modern subjects he painted. Previously, Millais’ work focused on literary, religious, and historical subjects. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood believed that art should depict serious subjects in a realistic way. In The Rescue, Millais applies these principles to a modern social problem: fire in London.

The painting depicts a fireman carrying three children out of a blazing house fire. To the left, the viewer can see flames and smoke while, to the right, the children’s mother waits with open arms to embrace them. While The Rescue is dramatic by its nature, the most striking element of the piece is its use of color. Millais studied real fires to capture an accurate image of light and smoke. The fire casts a strong, pinkish glow over the left side of the painting, while the right side is darkened by bluish smoke. The strong contrast of this color transition was especially startling to modern audiences.

In nineteenth century London, fire was a constant threat to the city’s inhabitants, leading to the creation of the first public fire brigade approximately twenty years before Millais painted The Rescue. At this time, fire brigades became focused on protecting life as opposed to property, an important transition in the lives of Londoners. Millais himself was friendly with several firemen, and witnessed real fires, giving him unique, first hand experience of the vital work of these firefighters. In fact, according to some sources, Millais even witnessed the death of a firefighter as during the course of a rescue.

The Rescue celebrates London’s modern heroes, the working class men who plunged into burning buildings to save the populace. As Millais explained in a letter to a friend, the aim of the painting was to “to honour a set of men quietly doing a noble work – firemen.”

This choice was not free from controversy at the time. The piece was criticized by many contemporary critics, possibly because of the social undertones of the piece. Art historian Robyn Cooper suggests that nineteenth century viewers would have understood a painting of a middle class woman opening her arms to a working class man to be a suggestive image. It also implies a breakdown of class stratification, which would also have been disturbing to contemporary viewers. The absence of a father in the painting and the fact that the woman is wearing a nightgown would have heightened the social unease caused by the painting.

Controversial or not, the drama and dynamism of The Rescue makes it one of my favorite Millais paintings.