Judged by its cover, Jason Rosenfeld's John Everett Millais initially appears to be a coffee-table book, but the contents prove very substantive and illuminating. Occasionally the author slips into popular language (e.g., “flashpoint”) or movie-trailer language about Millais (e.g., “He was a Baronet. He was rich. . . . He was a sell-out” [7]). Mentioning Vladimir Nabokov to remind readers about the constructions of masculinity in a biography of the artist by his son also seems unnecessary. Other minor quibbles involve the tiny size of numerous illustrations, allusions to British size A4 paper that will stymie most Americans, and some questionable inclusions of comparative material that might better be replaced with additional works by Millais. In addition, at times Rosenfeld seems torn between deep analysis (which he does superbly) of individual objects, almost as mini–case studies, and rapid-fire references. The result is that in some chapters, particularly toward the end, the author noticeably accelerates his judgments and makes the reader yearn for more of the exegesis at which Rosenfeld clearly excels.

Nonetheless, the many analyses and insights generated are very compelling and trenchant, often raising new points or sources unacknowledged in previous scholarship. For example, Rosenfeld cites a comment by the esoteric magazine, The Builder, which called the boy Jesus in Millais' Christ in the House of His Parents “a red-headed Jew boy” (46). This and other incursions into anti-Semitism are revealing, because typically only Holman Hunt's models were targeted as too ethnic. Weaving together the parts of Millais' career, Rosenfeld's major achievement is to revisit and revise lingering suspicions that the artist sold out commercially and professionally after his youthful phase of intense Pre-Raphaelitism. Rosenfeld makes a forceful argument along these lines, and he also deftly consolidates and relates the tortured relations between John Ruskin and Euphemia Gray, their families, and the arrival of Millais into this narrative of sexuality, art, and propriety. It is surprising even to Victorianists to discover that Ruskin kept “a log of when Effie did things he disapproved of” (82), suggesting their marital problems were not restricted to libidinal differences.

It is in the individual interpretations that Rosenfeld soars, citing earlier critical reception but often adding persuasive new readings of Ophelia in her “watery and vegetative coffin” (71), the “distant out-of-body gazes” (74) in Mariana and other works, and intimations of Turner in the watery motion of Millais' portrait of Ruskin. Furthermore, Rosenfeld's readings of A Huguenot, The Order of Release, The Woodman's Daughter, and Autumn Leaves show them all to be tinged with erotic desire. Even small asides prove trenchant—for example, how a figure in The Vale of Rest mimics an ancient Greek sculpture, Discus Thrower. Occasionally there seems some overreaching of revisionist impulse, and not everyone will be convinced, in chapter 4 in particular, that Millais was a leader in Aesthetic imagery whose Autumn Leaves, for example, inspired Whistler. It may be more accurate to assert that Millais created his own concept of beauty that sometimes paralleled and, at other times, veered from that of the Aesthetic movement's key exponent, but there is more evidence needed than portraits of females or their facial close-ups to validate Rosenfeld's claims. Even chapter 5 might have focused more on how paintings like Stella, Vanessa, Lalla Rookh, or The Marchioness of Huntly might be compared with full-blown Aesthetic counterparts.

For those interested in the changing depictions of womanhood in Victorian art, this book overflows with ideas, including how Millais sustained self-contained psychological states, dramatic distress, suspended narrative, and interiorized moods in ways that were ambitious, new, and mostly unnoted by contemporaries. At times the way chapters are divided—shifting from portraits to history pictures or subject paintings, children, and religious topics—is confusing, but this may be unavoidable given all the turf covered. This is particularly evident in the last chapter, which might arguably focus solely on the return to nature and Millais' often large-scale landscapes of Scottish scenery. In this finale, Rosenfeld provides cogent analysis of canvases like Chill October, which were distinctive on myriad levels and reflected how the artist dealt with “the increasing dominance of bourgeois taste over the fine arts” (195). These canvases, ambitious in theme and technique, served as Millais' “most powerful corrective to popular fashion” with “their textured, non-Pre-Raphaelite mode of seeing and in how contemporary audiences received them” (195–96). One of the achievements of this final section is its rewriting of Millais' saga by foregrounding his adventurousness and originality in reimagining nature in the late years of his career. The discussion of individual landscapes is of high caliber, but Americanists might also note how—albeit on a much larger scale—paintings like Scotch Firs, St. Martin's Summer, and Dew-Drenched Furze invoke comparison with so-called American Ruskinian intimate close-ups of forest interiors, pools of water, screens of flowers or weeds, or rocky turf in the late 1850s and 1860s. In the end, while some readers may still believe that Bubbles was compromised on various fronts despite its serious vanitas iconography, few would disagree with Rosenfeld's assertion that Millais produced a new kind of realism in his landscapes and all arenas of art. Among his accomplishments in this commanding book, Rosenfeld certainly demonstrates how Millais moved beyond his youthful visions, not “selling out” at all but instead “continuing to pursue an idea of realism through a process of close looking and transcription” (237).

Fiona MacCarthy's biography of Edward Burne-Jones also treats a second-generation Pre-Raphaelite artist, but her approach is distinctively different. The last major biography of this important artist was in 1975 by Penelope Fitzgerald, and MacCarthy's six-hundred-plus-page book extends and deepens the legacy of her predecessor in numerous ways. Given the length of the book, however, it would have been useful to advise readers at the outset that footnotes are embedded, arranged at the back of the text according to page number, rather than following the more traditional scholarly format. MacCarthy does not often analyze individual paintings in terms of meaning or iconography as Rosenfeld does; instead, she provides a painstakingly detailed account, nearly year by year and place by place, of Burne-Jones's long and multifaceted career. Given his vast range of productivity across many media, this book not only chronicles the trajectory of Burne-Jones's career and private life but also records that of many other artists such as William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Holland House circle, John Ruskin, Oscar Wilde, and several other notable Victorians.

One element that both biographies share is a focus on the significance of specific women in the artists' lives. Millais' only scandal involved marrying Ruskin's former wife, while Burne-Jones constantly compromised his reputation with endless affairs (whether physical or platonic) with Maria Zambaco and other women, such as Frances Graham, Mary Gladstone, Laura Tennant, Helen Mary Gaskell, Violet Maxse, and several little girl “pets” he indulged with special stories and devotion. For Millais, beautiful females were his models, not lovers, while Burne-Jones required continuing, even overlapping, infatuations to reinvigorate his spirit and his work. While Rosenfeld explicitly describes the evolution and traits of females in Millais' oeuvre, MacCarthy more subtly requires readers to draw conclusions about Burne-Jones's broad range of characters from evil Sidonia, a slumbering princess in Briar Rose, sexually potent Nimue/Zambacco in The Beguiling of Merlin, his 1870s “period of worship of the girls on the Golden Stairs” (252), and a stream of spiritualized, Aesthetic, even androgynous creatures in The Mill and many other works. Another connection with Rosenfeld is how MacCarthy repositions the artist's wife as much more crucial for the artist's career than previously imagined. Like Effie Millais, Georgiana Burne-Jones became in effect her husband's business manager. In Georgiana Burne-Jones's case, however, she continually and heroically chose to support her husband after his protracted affair with Zambaco. MacCarthy moreover includes “secrets” that are somewhat surprising: Ruskin's apparently inappropriate letters to Margaret Burne-Jones as a girl, Blanche Lindsay's divorce from her spouse (cofounder of the Grosvenor Gallery), and Burne-Jones's financial aid to Oscar Wilde's wife after his imprisonment.

Some new points of emphasis that emerge in MacCarthy's book involve many more details on Burne-Jones's numerous trips to Italy, his spiritual Mecca, and the impact that early Italian artists—Fra Angelico, Bottticelli, Mantegna, and others—had on his work throughout the decades. Another revisionist act emphasizes the significance of the Grosvenor Gallery in transforming Burne-Jones in the late 1870s and 1880s into a celebrity superstar of the Victorian art world. At the end, MacCarthy's epilogue traces how Burne-Jones was viewed in his wife's Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones (1904) and throughout the twentieth century, offering lively insights into how Yves St. Laurent and 1960s fashion, as well as composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, reinvigorated interest in Burne-Jones's art. The finale of a triumphant exhibition of Burne-Jones's art in the Tate in 2008 brings the cycle of appreciation, now reevaluation, back into favor. Utilizing the artist's Sleep of King Arthur in Avalon as a final work/fantasy, the author also effectively suggests that the artist himself might be considered as this Arthurian hero left eternally dreaming in his own version and vision or artistic paradise. Like Rosenfeld's book, this publication is a welcome addition to the reassessment of artists in the Pre-Raphaelite circle, and both deserve serious shelf space in the libraries of Victorianists belonging to art historical as well as interdisciplinary realms.