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Creator:
Sir John Everett Millais, 1829–1896
Title:
L'Enfant du Régiment [1856, Royal Academy of Arts, London, exhibition catalogue]
Former Title(s):
L'Enfant du Regiment (The Random Shot)
Date:
1854 to 1855
Materials & Techniques:
Oil on paper, laid on canvas, mounted on board
Dimensions:
17 3/4 x 24 inches (45.1 x 61 cm), Frame: 31 × 37 1/4 inches (78.7 × 94.6 cm)
Inscription(s)/Marks/Lettering:

Signed and dated, lower right: "18 [symbol] 55" in monogram "JEM"

Credit Line:
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund
Copyright Status:
Public Domain
Accession Number:
B1981.4
Classification:
Paintings
Collection:
Paintings and Sculpture
Link to Frame:
B1981.4FR
Subject Terms:
battle | child | church | costume | girl | historical subject | knight (landholder) | Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) | opera (discipline) | relief | sculpture | tomb | war | war
Access:
On view at the Yale University Art Gallery
Link:
https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/tms:5021
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John Everett Millais derived his subject from Donizetti’s opera La Fille du régiment. The heroine of the opera is Marie, offspring of a secret liaison between an aristocratic Englishwoman and a French army officer. After her father’s death in battle in the Napoleonic wars, Marie is adopted by his regiment. Millais represents not a scene from the opera but rather an incident from her earlier life and one of his own invention: during fighting in a church, Marie has been wounded and lies sleeping on a knight’s tomb.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016


The painter John Everett Millais, who with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt was a key member of the 1848 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, derived the sentimental subject of this painting from Gaetano Donizetti’s popular opera La Fille du régiment (The Daughter of the Regiment, 1840). The heroine is the child Marie, the innocent product of a secret liaison between two lovers, an aristocratic Englishwoman and an officer of the Eleventh Regiment of the Grand Army of Napoleon. After her father’s death in battle, Marie is with filial piety adopted by the surviving officers of the regiment. Millais represents not a scene from the opera but rather an incident he imagined occurring earlier: in the midst of fierce combat on the grounds of a medieval abbey, Marie is wounded and deposited for safety on the ancient tomb of a knight by an officer who has hurriedly bound her wrist and covered her up with his jacket. Despite the danger, noise, and chaos, she falls asleep.

Gallery label for Paul Mellon's Legacy: A Passion for British Art (Yale Center for British Art, 2007-04-18 - 2007-07-29)


Millais derived his subject from Donizetti's opera "La Fille du régiment." The heroine of the opera is Marie, offspring of a secret liaison between an aristocratic Englishwoman and a French army officer. After her father's death in battle in the Napoleonic wars, Marie is adopted by his regiment. Millais represents not a scene from the opera but rather an incident from her earlier life and one of his own invention: during fighting in a church Marie has been wounded and lies sleeping on a knight's tomb.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2005
Millais derived the subject of this painting from Donizetti's opera La Fille du régiment. The heroine of the opera is Marie, offspring of a secret liaison between the Marquise de Berken?eld and an officer in the French army. Since her father's death in battle the child has been brought up by the regiment of grenadiers to which he belonged. The action of the opera takes place in 1805, during the Napoleonic Wars, and Marie is no longer a child but a young woman. Millais's painting would therefore show an imagined incident from her early life. The scene may have been suggested by the lines sung by her and the regimental sergeant, Sulpice, as they reminisce about her unusual upbringing: "Et j'avais, ?lle militaire, pour berceau votre fourniment / Où tu dormais paisiblement…au doux bruit du tambour battant! (And I, a military girl, had your soldier's kit as my cradle / Where you slept peacefully…to the sweet sound of the beating drum!)." The opera was performed in London at Her Majesty's every season from 1847 to 1851, except for 1849, and also while Millais's painting was on show at the Royal Academy in 1856. Millais was an avid operagoer, and had already based two major paintings on operatic plots: the highly successful A Huguenot (1851-52; Makins Collection) and The Proscribed Royalist, 1651 (1852-53; private collection). The setting was painted in Winchelsea Parish Church, Sussex, in the autumn of 1854; the exterior of the same church can be seen on the horizon in Millais's The Blind Girl (Birmingham City Art Gallery), the background of which he also painted in Winchelsea in 1854. He shows the injured girl sleeping on the fourteenth-century tomb of Gervaise Alard, first Warden of the Cinque Ports, which is painted with a typically Pre-Raphaelite attention to details and particulars. Millais had first visited Winchelsea a couple of years earlier, writing enthusiastically to his friend Harriet Collins: "I shall never rest quiet till I am painting there. We went over the church which is celebrated for its early monuments of Knights Templars, such glorious old tombs."1 In 1854 he was there from about August 24 to November 22, in company with his friend, assistant, and pupil, Michael Halliday. He probably painted the setting of L'Enfant du Régiment after that of The Blind Girl, in October-November, leaving the center of the composition blank for the addition of the figure. This he painted about a year later, after moving to Perth in Scotland.
One of the leading principles of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was to paint everything and everyone faithfully from life as an individual likeness. Their figures are never imaginary or "ideal," but exact portraits of carefully chosen models. In this case the model for the child was Isabella Nicol, a Perth girl who also posed for the younger companion in The Blind Girl. The coat draped over her is identifiable as part of the uniform worn by grenadiers of the French infantry of the line between 1795 and 1808. Whether Millais intended the fighting in which he shows the regiment involved to be taking place during the French revolutionary wars or under Napoleon is unknown, and he may have had no exact historical moment in mind.
[1] Millais Paper, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.



Malcolm Warner

Malcolm Warner, This other Eden, paintings from the Yale Center for British Art, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1998, p. 156, no. 63, ND1314.3 Y36 1998 (YCBA)

YUAG European Galleries (Yale University Art Gallery, 2023-12-01 - 2025-01-15) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

In a New Light: Paintings from the Yale Center for British Art (Yale University Art Gallery, 2023-03-24 - 2023-12-03) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition] [Exhibition Description]

The Critique of Reason : Romantic Art, 1760–1860 (Yale University Art Gallery, 2015-03-06 - 2015-07-26) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

Millais (The Bunkamaura Museum of Art, 2008-08-30 - 2008-10-26) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

Millais (Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, 2008-06-07 - 2008-08-17) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

Millais (Van Gogh Museum, 2008-02-15 - 2008-05-18) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

Millais (Tate Britain, 2007-09-26 - 2008-01-13) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

This Other Eden : British Paintings from the Paul Mellon Collection at Yale (Art Gallery of South Australia, 1998-09-16 - 1998-11-15) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition] [Exhibition Description]

This Other Eden : British Paintings from the Paul Mellon Collection at Yale (Queensland Art Gallery, 1998-07-15 - 1998-09-06) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition] [Exhibition Description]

This Other Eden : British Paintings from the Paul Mellon Collection at Yale (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1998-05-01 - 1998-07-05) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition] [Exhibition Description]

Pre-Raphaelites (Tate) (Tate Britain, 1984-03-07 - 1984-05-28) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

Acquisitions : The First Decade 1977-1986, Yale Center for British Art , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1986, pp. 9, 16, no. 39, fig. 8, N590.2 A7 OVERSIZE (YCBA) [YCBA]

Susan P. Casteras, English Pre-Raphaelitism and its reception in America in the nineteenth century, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Rutherford [N.J.] London Cranbury, NJ, 1990, pp. 76, 95, ND467.5 P7 C37 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Malcolm Cormack, Concise Catalogue of Paintings in the Yale Center for British Art, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1985, pp. 160-161, N590.2 A83 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Cornelius P. Darcy, The encouragement of the fine arts in Lancashire, 1760-1860, 3d ser., v. 24, Manchester University Press, Manchester [England], 1976, p. 158, N5245 D27 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Keren Rosa Hammerschlag, Frederic Leighton : death, mortality, resurrection, Ashgate Publishing, Burlington, VT, 2015, pp. 67, 118, fig. 2.12, NJ18.L531 H36 2015 (YCBA) [YCBA]

John Everett Millais, Appletons' Journal: a magazine of general literature, vol. 12, no. 292, October 24, 1874, p. 514, Film S2504 (SML) Also available online via Google Books [ORBIS]

Julia Marciari-Alexander, This other Eden : Paintings from the Yale Center for British Art, , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1998, p. 156, no. 63, ND1314.3 Y36 1998 (YCBA) [YCBA]

John Guille Millais, The life and letters of Sir John Everett Millais, president of the Royal Academy, Methuen & co., ltd., London, 1899, pp.237-39 (v. 1), NJ18 M61 M55 1899 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Millais, an exhibition organized by the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool & the Royal Academy of Arts, London, January-April, 1967. , Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool & London, 1967, pp. 122-23, NJ18 M61 W35 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Leslie Parris, The Pre-Raphaelites, Tate Publishing, London, 1994, p. 136, no. 70, N6767.5 P7 P742 1984 + (YCBA) [YCBA]

Paul Mellon's Legacy : a passion for British art [large print labels], , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 2007, v. 1, N5220 M552 P381 2007 OVERSIZE (YCBA) [YCBA]

Duncan Robinson, Acquisitions : The First Decade 1977 - 1986, , Burlington Magazine, vol. 128, October 1986, pp. 9, 16, no. 39, fig. 8, N1 B87 128:3 OVERSIZE (YCBA) [YCBA]

Jason Rosenfeld, Millais, Tate Publishing, London, 2007, p. 100, no. 61, N18 M61 R67 2007 + (YCBA) [YCBA]

William Michael Rossetti, Fine art, chiefly contemporary: notices re-printed, with revisions., AMS Press, New York, 1970, p. 218, N7476 R66 1907A (YCBA) [YCBA]

John Ruskin, Notes on some of the principal pictures of Sir John Everett Millais, exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery, 1886 : with a preface and original and selected criticisms , William Reese, London, 1886, pp. 20-21, ND4497 M6 R8 1886 + (YCBA RARE BOOKS) [ORBIS]

M. H. (Marion Henry) Spielmann, Millais and his works, with special reference to the exhibition at the Royal Academy 1898, W. Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1898, p. 102, no. 59, NJ18 M61 L65 (YCBA) [YCBA]

The First hundred years of the Royal Academy, 1769-1868, Winter exhibition, 1951-52. , Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1951, pp. 122-23 (v,1), no. 289, N5054 .A545 1951/52 (YCBA) Also available Fiche B185 at the YCBA Reference Library and Photo Archive [YCBA]

The Royal Academy, Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, vol. 2, no. 28, May 10, 1856, p. 32, Available Online : British Periodicals Also Available in Hardcopy : 2000 +S52 (BRBL) [ORBIS]

Malcolm Warner, Notes on Millais' Use of Subjects from the Opera, 1851-4, The Pre-Raphaelite Review, vol. 2, November 1978, p. 74, NX543 J68 + (LSF) [ORBIS]


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