The marriage
of Euphemia, 'Effie', Gray to John Ruskin was annulled on 15 July 1854, and
just under a year later, on 3 July 1855, she married the painter John Everett
Millais. The idea for this bust originated on 7 May 1856. It was in this year
that the painter's elder brother, William, was adding colour to Marochetti's
busts of Dalip Singh and Princess Gouramma. Millais wrote to his wife on 8 May
of that year, saying how much he had
admired one of Marochetti's coloured busts. He had, he told her, expressed the
hope to Marochetti "that one day I should be rich enough to afford having
you [Effie] done in the same way". Marochetti, he went on, had
"jumped at the thought, and said he would consider it an understood thing
- that he should make a bust of you in return for any sketch I should give him,
adding that he would beg my acceptance of it, if I hesitated. He has seen you,
and admires you immensely. Indeed, as he is very desirous of getting portraits
of all the most beautiful persons he can get to sit, this kindness has
something to do with your looks....". (J.G. Millais, Life and Letters of
J.E. Millais, Londdon 1899, vol.II, p.300)
We certainly
know that Effie was at Marochetti's house in Onslow Square, unaccompanied by
her husband, on the 23 Dec. 1857, since it was then that, as Millais reported
to his father-in-law, she had refused to shake the proffered hand of Pauline
Trevelyan, who was known to have taken Ruskin's side in the marriage break-up.
This visit may have been in relation to a sitting. (Mary Lutyens, Millais
and the Ruskins, London, 1967, p.212, note) It was however only in 1862
that Millais presented to Marochetti, in exchange for the bust, his painting of
the biblical subject The Woman Looking for the Lost Piece of Money. Unfortunately
this painting was destroyed when a gas meter in Marochetti's London home
exploded. Millais and his wife are recorded as having paid a visit to
Marochetti's French château. The painter's son dated this visit to some
time in the 1870s, but he must have been mistaken in this, since by then
Marochetti would have been dead. (Life and Letters of J.E. Millais,
vol.II, pp.368 and 446)
There is an
interesting reminder of the friendship between Millais and Marochetti in the
collection of the sculptor's descendants. This is a bronze cast of a statue of
Leda and the Swan, which in those days was attributed to Michelangelo. This
unfinished marble work was purchased by Millais in Florence, at the suggestion
of the archeologist and art-lover Austin Henry Layard, and was later acquired
by the South Kensington (now the Victoria and Albert) Museum, where it has been
re-attributed to Vincenzo Danti. It is most likely that the bronze version was
cast in Marochetti's own foundry in Sydney Mews.
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