Le Val du repos

John Everett Millais painted this in 1858, and its full title, from a Scottish song, is Where the Weary Find Repose. Two nuns work in a convent graveyard at dusk. One digs a grave, sleeves rolled, boot on the spade. The other sits and looks straight out at us, a skull-shaped rosary at her waist and a wreath of dead flowers hanging on the cross behind her. Millais had married the year before, and the idea reportedly came to him while thinking about the shortness of life on his honeymoon. The picture unsettled Victorian viewers, who found the gravedigging nun too grim and too physical, and it did not sell easily. He built the colour on close observation, the yellow band of sunset behind the black poplars, painted, he said, from a real evening sky. A little coffin-shaped cloud drifts above the trees.