His great misfortune was that he confused art with life. What so appealed to Ruskin about their painting was the way it conformed to his notions of female innocence and unworldliness. Far from sexless, the Pre-Raphaelites were by and large a fairly randy bunch, yet you might not know that from their art. Lonely and frustrated, Effie is drawn to pre-Raphaelite painter John. At nineteen, she married the prominent art historian and critic John Ruskin (Greg Wise), but Ruskin refused to consummate their marriage. She had previously been married to the art critic John Ruskin, but the marriage was annulled, and she left him without it having been consummated.
Effie gray movie#
She was, in short, the very antithesis of those pale, languid, long-tressed goddesses the Pre-Raphaelites - Millais included - so loved to portray, and not surprisingly, as she grew older, her husband stopped painting her altogether and turned to younger models. Based on the real-life scandal that shocked Victorian-era England, this movie tells the story of Euphemia 'Effie' Gray (Dakota Fanning). Euphemia Chalmers Millais, Lady Millais (ne Gray 23 December 1897) was a Scottish artists' model and the wife of Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais. She was beautiful, flirtatious, loved parties and shopping. Shrewd and socially adept, she became in effect Millais’s business manager, keeping accounts, drumming up clients, running their household in such a way that it was an advertisement for his art, and being in a no-nonsense, unsentimental fashion mother to eight children. Effie or Euphemia, to use her real name was the oldest of 15 children (only 8 survived) born to a prosperous Scottish couple.
Effie gray code#
Fagence Cooper’s book is for the most part graceful and judicious, and Effie Gray emerges from it as a very likable figure: lively, fashionable, brave enough to resist publicly the Victorian code that said wives were subject to their husbands and should suffer in silence. Effie Gray opens with the telling of a fairy tale not a particularly happy one, as it’s rooted in death, but still a fairy tale that sets the stage for Richard Laxton’s. Fagence Cooper is somewhat sympathetic to him, you would not immediately gather from her book that Ruskin was not just an undersexed, self-absorbed workaholic but also one of the towering figures of his age - a brilliant and indefatigable writer, critic and social reformer who changed the way Victorians looked at the world - or that his end was tragic and pitiable.īut Ms. The reader learns perhaps more than is necessary about domestic arrangements, illnesses, comings and goings, while Ruskin pretty much vanishes from the picture. It is based almost entirely on Gray family correspondence, much of it just recently made available, and its focus is narrow, intimate, almost claustrophobic at times. A look at the scandalous love triangle between Victorian art critic John Ruskin (Greg Wise), his teenage bride Euphemia 'Effie' Gray (Dakota Fanning), and Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais (Tom Sturridge). Fagence Cooper’s is one of the rare books that take Effie’s side. With Dakota Fanning, Polly Dartford, Greg Wise, Tom Sturridge.
Ruskin scholars tend to regard his marriage as an unfortunate six-year blip that only got in the way of the great work ahead of him.