A Souvenir of Velazquez

Throughout his career Millais painted children to provoke meditations on transience, beauty and truth. This work was inspired by the prominent Spanish artist Diego Velázquez's mid-17th century portraits of the Infanta Maria Margarita, which also depicts a young girl in an ostentatious dress. By the late 1860s, Millais’s concern with creating a mood or atmosphere in his paintings corresponded with the ideals of the emerging Aesthetic movement, which championed the beautiful, sensual qualities of art and design over practical, moral or narrative considerations.