“Blow Blow Thou Wind” by John Everett Millais depicts a winter landscape with a hapless dog at the centre, 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 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 to as to whether he is 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 and developing a new and powerful form of realism in his art. His fascination of landscapes with wild and bleak locations is also evident in his many landscape paintings of his later period, which usually depict difficult terrain during the winter season like this painting.

Essential Facts:

• 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

Artist Essential Facts:

• Name:                    Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet
• Born:                      1829 – Southampton, England
• Died:                       1896 (aged 67) – Kensington, London
• Nationality            English
• Notable works:
  • Ophelia
  • Christ in the House of His Parents.

 

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“As man disappears from sight, the land remains.” Maori Proverb

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Photo Credit: John Everett Millais [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons