Die Rettung

In 1855 a fireman was still a fairly new kind of hero. London's organised fire brigade had only been pulled together in 1833 out of a tangle of insurance-company crews, and Millais had watched a fireman die during a rescue. He set out, he told a friend, to honour a set of men quietly doing a noble work. That was a strange choice for him. Millais had helped found the Pre-Raphaelites a few years earlier, painters known for medieval knights and scenes from Shakespeare, not for men in modern uniform charging out of a burning house. Here the fireman carries three children through the smoke while their mother reaches up to take them back. When it hung at the Royal Academy that year, the critic John Ruskin, who could be merciless, called it the only great picture of the season.