‘Startling; Nay,Almost Repulsive’: Light Effects and Nascent Sensation in John Everett Millais’s The Rescue

Taking Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais’s The Rescue (1855) as a case study of shifting aesthetic and moral frameworks, the essay investigates the ways in which mid-century British debates regarding the proper representation of light effects illuminate anxieties about a physically embodied viewer, one who encountered pictures in individualized ways that required regulation and guidance. Represented light, as an element that had a measurable effect on the senses, clearly stimulated a physical response and therefore brought the body to the fore in the art encounter. Types of painting that forcefully engaged the somatic self could become suspect and consequently subject to a process by which they were designated as ‘sensation’, a category in fraught relation with the disappearing ‘sublime’. Combining close visual analysis, a discussion of The Rescue’s novel subject matter, remarks by its first beholders, and nineteenth-century aesthetic theory, the article reflects on the ways in which discourses of art revealed anxieties about the formation of the modern subject and argues that The Rescue is a node in which the death of the sublime meets the birth of sensation.     

Four Alien Priories in Monmouthshire

Abstract

Inigo Jones is conventionally seen as an isolated genius who had little direct effect on contemporary architects and builders. This is true if his early, elaborately Classical, buildings such as the Banqueting House, are examined in isolation. However, after 1630 Jones developed a very different, astylar domestic manner which proved highly influential among contemporary architects and builders both in London and the countryside.