Elgiva seized by order of Odo, Archbishop of Canterbury

John Everett Millais

Date: 1843

Materials: Pen and brown ink

The young artist

Millais, already a precociously gifted artist, entered the Royal Academy Schools at the age of eleven. Six years later, he exhibited his first large oil painting at the Royal Academy, having already produced a substantial body of drawings strongly weighted towards subjects from British history.

He entered a competition organised by the Art Union of London in 1842-43 for a set of outline drawings illustrating a theme from English history. Choosing the Anglo-Saxon period, Millais submitted sixteen drawings, of which this is one.

Anglo-Saxons

He later painted the subject in oils, offering this quotation in the Royal Academy catalogue of 1847:

 "Archbishop Odo, to avenge the banishment of Dunstan, dissolved Edwy's marriage with Elgiva, on the plea of kinship, and sent a party of soldiers into the palace, who seized the Queen, and, after branding her face, in order to destroy that fatal beauty which had seduced Edwy, forcibly conveyed her to Ireland". 

Linear style

The 'outline' style so fashionable at this period owes much to a familiarity both with John Flaxman's engraved illustrations of Homer and Dante, and with the German engraver Moritz Retzsch's 'Outlines' to Shakespeare (1793; first published in London 1805 - 1807), which was available with English text by the late 1830s

The young Millais's re-interpretation of these sources is an important contribution to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's earliest common style, with its directness and sense of involvement in the scene of Elgiva's humiliation.