A Dream of the Past: Sir Isumbras at the Ford

When Millais showed this at the Royal Academy in 1857, it went badly. A knight in old armour carries two peasant children across a ford, a dream of a chivalric past. Critics fixed on the enormous horse and the children's overdone faces. John Ruskin, once Millais's great champion, called it not merely a fall but a catastrophe, and there was history behind that venom: a few years earlier Ruskin's wife Effie had left him and married Millais. Another artist mocked the picture in a print titled 'A Nightmare,' with Millais himself cast as the knight. Stung, Millais went back and repainted parts of the canvas, the giant horse among them, so the animal here is not quite the one the critics first laughed at.