The Blind Girl

Millais started this landscape in 1854 in Winchelsea, on the Sussex coast, and finished it two years later in Scotland, adding the two figures last. They are itinerant beggars, sisters, resting by the road after a rainstorm. The older one is blind, a concertina in her lap, her face tilted up to feel a warmth she cannot see, while the younger girl turns to look at the double rainbow behind them. Millais loaded the scene with everything sight can offer, the rainbow, a butterfly settled on her shawl, the wet grass, all of it lost on the girl at the centre. When it was shown in 1856 a viewer pointed out that he had painted the colours of the second rainbow the wrong way round, and Millais went back and corrected them.