“Blow Blow Thou Wind” by John Everett Millais depicts a winter landscape with a hapless dog at the center, with divided loyalty between the stranded mother with her child, and the man who is walking away. Which will the loyal dog pick?
The mother is seated on a rock in the snow. She has her shawl pulled over her head to keep the wind and cold from her child as it feeds. In the distance, the child’s father is walking away.
The poem below provides a clue. Is the man abandoning the family of going ahead to search for food and shelter?
The title comes from one of Shakespeare’s poems in “As You Like It”:
Blow Blow thou winter wind
Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude…
…Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remembered not.
The artist, Sir John Everett Millais, was a Victorian-era English painter who was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded at his home in London.
Millais became a famous exponent of the style, his painting Christ in the House of His Parents.
By the mid-1850s, Millais was moving away from the Pre-Raphaelite style. He had developed a new and powerful form of realism in his art.
His fascination with landscapes and with wild and bleak locations is also evident in the many landscape paintings of his later period, which usually depict difficult terrain during the winter like this painting.
Blow Blow Thou Wind
- Title: Blow Blow Thou Wind
- Artist: John Everett Millais
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Date: 1892
- Style: Realism
- Genre: Landscape
- Dimensions: 108 × 155 cm (42.5 × 61 in)
- Museum: Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki
John Everett Millais
- Name: Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet
- Born: 1829 – Southampton, England
- Died: 1896 (aged 67) – Kensington, London
- Nationality English
- Notable works:
- Isabella
- Christ in the House of His Parents
- The Martyr of Solway
- Ophelia
- Blow Blow Thou Wind
- The Black Brunswicker
- A Dream of the Past: Sir Isumbras at the Ford
A Virtual Tour of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki
- “Tamati Waka Nene” by Gottfried Lindauer
- “Paratene Te Manu” by Gottfried Lindauer
- “In Time of Peril” by Edmund Blair Leighton
- “Blow Blow Thou Wind” by John Everett Millais
A Virtual Tour of Pre-Raphaelite Artists
John Everett Millais
- Isabella
- Christ in the House of His Parents
- The Martyr of Solway
- Ophelia
- Blow Blow Thou Wind
- The Black Brunswicker
- A Dream of the Past: Sir Isumbras at the Ford
William Holman Hunt
- Christ in the House of His Parents
- Our English Coasts
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
- Lady Lilith
- Dante’s Dream
- Dante Gabriel Rossetti – Self Portrait
- The Beloved
- Bocca Baciata
John William Waterhouse
- The Lady of Shalott
- The Favorites of the Emperor Honorius
- Circe Invidiosa
- Diogenes
- I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, Said the Lady of Shalott
- Hylas and the Nymphs
- Echo and Narcissus
- Ulysses and the Sirens
- Consulting the Oracle
- A Tale from the Decameron
- Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses
- Saint Eulalia
Marie Spartali Stillman
- Love’s Messenger
Ford Madox Brown
- The Star of Bethlehem
- King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid
Henry Holiday
- Dante and Beatrice
Edward Burne-Jones
- The Star of Bethlehem
- King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid
Auckland Art Gallery – Mary Kisler on John Everett Millais
USC Thornton Concert Choir – Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind
Blow, blow thou winter wind – John Rutter
~~~
“All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.”
– John Ruskin
~~~
Photo Credit: John Everett Millais [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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