Fancy Dress

Peter Campbell

• Millais: Portraits by Peter Funnell and Malcolm Warner
  National Portrait Gallery, 224 pp, £35.00, February 1999, ISBN 85 514 1255 8
• John Everett Millais by G.H. Fleming
  Constable, 318 pp, £20.00, August 1998, ISBN 0 09 478560 0
• Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer by Stephen Wildman and John Christian
  Abrams, 360 pp, £48.00, October 1998, ISBN 0 8109 6522 4
• Frederic Leighton: Antiquity, Renaissance, Modernity edited by Tim Barringer and Elizabeth Prettejohn
  Yale, 332 pp, £40.00, March 1999, ISBN 0 300 07937 0

In 1886 there was an exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery of the work of John Everett Millais (Sir John, in fact: he had recently been made a baronet). There were pictures from his Pre-Raphaelite infancy, like Isabella and Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop; anecdotal ones, like My First Sermon (a child portrait in the Bubbles line); landscapes (Chill October); pictures with stories (The Proscribed Royalist) and pictures from stories (Mariana). They were all famous.