Inscribed on a label on the reverse: "At the end of the last chapter, we left Lucy Robarts waiting for an introduction to Mrs Crawley who was sitting with one baby in her lap while she was rocking another who lay in a cradle at her feet. Mr Crawley in the meanwhile had risen from his seat with his finger between the leaves of an old grammar book out of which he had been teaching his two elder children. The whole Crawley family was thus before them when Mrs Robarts and Lucy entered the sitting-room …" from Anthony Trollope’s "Framley Parsonage" with six illustrations by Sir John Everett Millais. First serialised 1860-1861 in Cornhill Magazine then published as a book in 1861. In 1860, Millais made a series of works on paper for his friend Anthony Trollope’s novel Framley Parsonage (1860). The Cornhill Magazine, where it was published as a series, was a new monthly publication edited by William Makepeace Thackeray. The story, with Millais' illustrations, was a huge success. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote: I wish Mr Trollope would go on writing 'Framley Parsonage' for ever. (1) In his autobiography, Trollope enthusiastically reminisces over his working relationship with Millais. … Altogether he drew from my tales eighty-seven drawings, and I do not think that more conscientious work was ever done by a man … In every figure that he drew it was his object to promote the views of the writer whose work he had undertaken to illustrate, and he never spared himself any pains in studying that work, so as to enable him to do so. (2) The Crawley Family was bought by Thomas Plint (3), an enthusiastic supporter and patron of the Pre-Raphaelites. He also owned Millais’ controversial early painting Christ in the House of his Parents as well as Arthur Hughes’s Ophelia, Holman Hunt’s Saviour in the Temple and Madox Brown’s Last of England, among other major works by the Brotherhood. (1) In a letter to George Smith, publisher of the Cornhill, 1 March 1860 (2) Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, William Blackwood, Edinburgh 1883, (3) John Guille Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, Methuen and Co. 1900, page 359
Thomas Edward Plint; his sale: London, 7-8 March 1862, lot 187; sold for £22 to: Moore Private collection; to 2005
The Liverpool Academy, 1864, number 155
Anthony Trollope, Framley Parsonage, The Cornhill Magazine, August 1860, engraved by the Dalziel Brothers, illustration opposite page 7 Mary Bennett, The Burlington Magazine, 'A Check List of Pre-Raphaelite Pictures exhibited at Liverpool 1846-67 and some of their Northern Collectors', volume 105, number 728, November 1963, page 477, 486-493, 495