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The Ambiguous Graveyard: Religious Sympathy And Erotic Desire In Sir John Everett Millais's The Vale Of Rest, Greg W. Spangler

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

The Vale of Rest, 1859, despite or because of its oddities—two nuns digging a grave—was in its own day understood as a touchstone for Sir John Everett Millais and his career. Its critical reception in 1859 was hostile, with charges of “ugliness,” but by 1897, it was hanging in the Tate museum. Scholars and biographers have accordingly seen it as a turning point in Millais’s abandonment of Pre-Raphaelite realism for a more aestheticized and bourgeois style. The subject of nuns has led other scholars to investigate Millais’s sympathies with the Oxford Movement, the midcentury effort to reform the Anglican …