A Huguenot on St. Bartholomew’s Day by John Everett Millais, 1852

The painting portrays an imaginary incident at the time of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris on 24 August 1572. Thousands of Huguenots were murdered on St. Bartholomew’s Day. Of the Huguenots fortunate enough to survive the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, many fled to the Netherlands, establishing what was to become a long-lived Huguenot community there.

In this work, Millais had portrayed the conflict in the form of an ill-fatted love-affair between a Catholic and a Protestant where the staunch Protestant is shown refusing the white cloth being tied around his arm by his Catholic lover.

An early work of Millais’s, the painting has been hailed as the ‘originating image in Victorian courtship pictures’ and ‘archetypal Pre-Raphaelite composition’.
A Huguenot on St. Bartholomew’s Day by John Everett Millais, 1852