SIR,—As a layman, I respectfully agree with Dr Roy Strong
that 'everything was all right [with Millais] until that woman came along'—i.e., until about 1856. Some of the later pictures are indeed as nasty and repellent as some of the earlier are beautiful and fascinating. I wonder, however, if Dr Strong is quite fair to the later portraits? I had never really been able to believe, upon the evidence of anecdotes and photographs, that Mr Gladstone exercised over those who saw and heard him so powerful, and often so baleful, an influence. But I believe it now, having set eyes on the Millais portrait of 1879: I felt quite uncomfortable in the same gallery with it. And surely the Tennyson and the Disraeli—both 1881—are also very good?
'Effie has an awful lot to answer for,' no doubt: but she seems to have turned her husband into a portrait painter.
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