Having just seen the film Effie Grey, about John Ruskin's wife who ...
I was interested to view
It wasn't to everybody's taste.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Millais' close colleague and co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, is reported to have described the work as a "very stupid affair to suit the day - but very big and fetching him £900! without copyright, for which he expects £1000 more."
The copyright must have been a ...since engravings
Ford Madox Brown, Rossetti's teacher, and influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, called the color "bad, but some expressions beautiful and lovely (in) parts."
? thought the composition very odd -
Only John Ruskin, romanticist, naturalist, critic and painter, friend of the Pre-Raphaelites, and a man whose view of the century tends to be confirmed with perspective, asserted that Peace Concluded "would rank in the future with Autumn Leaves as among the world's masterpieces."
A larger, higher resolution copy of this image can be viewed here
Hancher, Michael, "'Urgent Private Affairs': Millais's 'Peace Concluded, 1856'", The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 133, No. 1061 (Aug., 1991), pp. 499-506.
Lalumia, Matthew, "Realism and Anti-Aristocratic Sentiment in Victorian Depictions of the Crimean War", Victorian Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Autumn, 1983), pp. 25-51 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/3827272].
Shefer, Elaine (1990). "The Order of Release and Peace Concluded: Millais's Reversal of a Victorian Formula". Woman's Art Journal 11 (2): 30-33.
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