Die Rückkehr der Taube zur Arche

In 1851 the young Pre-Raphaelites were being savaged in the London press for painting sacred subjects with plain, unidealised faces, and John Everett Millais answered with this quiet interior from the story of the Flood. Two of Noah's daughters-in-law hold the returning dove, one pressing it to her cheek while the other kisses its feathers, the olive sprig still in its beak as the first sign the waters are falling. Millais had meant to add Noah and a crowd of animals but dropped them to get the picture ready for the Royal Academy. The critic John Ruskin admired it so much he tried to buy it on the spot, only to find the Oxford printer Thomas Combe had got there first, and it hangs today among the Pre-Raphaelite works Combe left to the Ashmolean.