The Blind Girl (1856) by John Everett Millais

John Everett Millais (1829-1926) is a distinguished British painter from the mid-nineteenth century. He is celebrated for his prolific career, but is best known for his founding of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, along with fellow British artists William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

In this painting John Everett Millais shows a beggar girl, her eyes closed, sitting in a meadow after a storm, her poverty identified by her tattered clothes and her blindness by the label around her neck (‘pity the blind’). All her senses, besides that of sight, are heightened. She can feel the comforting touch of the hand of her companion, perhaps her sister, in her left hand and her body leaning against her.

The Blind Girl (1856) is a deeper and higher effort than the last; a most pathetic thought, treated in a spirit which may be called religious. In 1857, Millais is awarded by the Academy of Liverpool for the painting of Blind Girl.
The Blind Girl (1856) by John Everett Millais