Somnambulist by Millais

The Somnabulist, 1871

Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896)

Oil on canvas

This subject of this painting may have been partly inspired by the popularity of the novel The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, published in 1860.

This book became an instant bestseller and although the girl in this painting is sleepwalking, which does not happen in the book, the ghostly figure of a woman in white does feature strongly in the popular culture of the day. (The book was recently made into a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber).

Another inspiration for Millais might have been Bellini’s Italian opera La Sonnambula, first produced in Milan in 1831, and in London that same year, and again in 1847, 1848, 1861 and 1871.

The subject of sleepwalking fascinated the Victorians and relates to their preoccupation with the occult. The Victorians became fascinated by contact with “the other world” through clairvoyance, séances, ghosts, poltergeists and with the phenomenon of sleepwalking. Here the woman is walking very close to the edge of a cliff and we as viewers are uncertain as to whether she may fall and possibly die, or whether she will keep to the path.

This painting was reviewed in 1871 in The Illustrated London News: “the fair figure of the somnambulist, and the accompanying night effect, with the mysterious, half-iridescent glimmer of an unseen moon on the sleepwalker’s nightdress… Her peril as she walks with wide-open yet unseeing eyes along the verge of the sea-cliffs is intimated without the least approach to obtrusive sensationalism”.

Millais was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 and for several years his paintings were extremely detailed and sometimes shocked the public in their style and subject matter. Later on in the 1850s Millais changed to a looser, but technically brilliant style and became a highly sought after portrait and genre (story telling scene) painter. He was elected a Royal Academician in 1863 and President of the Royal Academy in 1896.

Purchased in 1969