SIR JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS BT PRB PRA HRI HRCA (1829-1896)
PRE-RAPHAELITE (founded 1848) Biography

Provenance

Ernest Gambart;
Gambart's sale, Christie's, 31 March 1871, lot 41 (bought by Virtue, £56/14/0);
James Virtue's sale, Christie's, 1 March 1879, lot 25 (bought Lawrie, £27/6/0);
Rembrandt Gallery, Liverpool, from whom bought in the 1920s by Charles Cottle;
The Rev. James Cottle;
Cottle's Sale, Sotheby's, 19 March 1979, lot 23

Literature

Millais, J.G., The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, 1899, volume II, page 488 (given the title The Ghost Story); also see pages 359-60
English Influences on Vincent Van Gogh, exhibition organised by the Arts Council, 1974-5, the print exhibited as number 53. Van Gogh is quoted as referring to the illustrations as: "By Millais himself, a beautiful sheet, 'Christmas Stories'."

Description / Expertise

This watercolour is probably a worked up version of the drawing made for Dalziel’s and the Illustrated London News done at the same time. It is listed in Effie Millais’s Account Book under the year 1862 as sold for £42 with the title Telling a Ghost Story.
Several of the figures in the subject are familiar from other paintings by Millais. The young boy at the top left of the painting and the one in the foreground similarly seated but turned around appear in The Boyhood of Raleigh. The narrator of the story has a close physical similarity, except for being clean-shaven, to the figure in Millais’s painting The North-west Passage.