Seven days of wood smoke and crackling leaves—Sir John Everett Millais

Sir John Everett Millais was an English painter and illustrator and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. However, as he matured as an artist, he left the rigid constraints and intellectual conceits of that movement behind, much to the critics’ dismay (and our benefit).

Millais may have been making a comment about the social divide between the two girls in middle-class clothing (modeled after his sisters-in-law) and the two working-class girls—or he may have felt that putting two girls in black on the edge of the canvas would overbalance his composition. Likewise, the little girl’s apple may be a comment on original sin, or it may be just an apple.