LONDON, ENGLAND.- Cherry Ripe, one of Sir John Everett Millais’ (1829-96) best loved and most well-known paintings, is to be included in Sotheby’s sale of Important British Pictures on Thursday, July 1, 2004. An iconic image of Victorian childhood, it contributed greatly in establishing Millais as the most successful painter of his generation. It was first exhibited in 1881 and was instantly popular but apart from a brief appearance in a Royal Academy exhibition in 1958, it has been out of sight for several decades. It is estimated at £800,000-1,200,000.

Suave, sophisticated and immensely talented, Millais is still regarded as one of the most popular British artists, more than a hundred years after his death. He understood and sought to capture the beauty of childhood and his series of portraits of young sitters have an intensity of beauty in which youth is taken as the subject and treated with the most tender of sentiment.

Cherry Ripe was the best known from the series of which he painted between 1860 and 1880. It was inspired by an 1879 fancy dress ball hosted by perhaps the most influential of all 19th century art journals, The Graphic. Edie Ramage (later Mrs Francisco de Paula Ossorio), the young niece of the magazine’s editor, Mr. Thomas, came to the ball wearing a costume similar to one worn by the sitter in Sir Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of Penelope Boothby. Millais was so struck by Edie’s appearance that immediately after the ball she was taken to his studio, where he began a portrait for her uncle with a price tag of a thousand guineas.

In 1880, the Christmas edition of The Graphic published the first prints of Cherry Ripe. 500,000 (other accounts suggested 600,000) large colour copies of the painting were made by one of the most famous and celebrated of Victorian engravers, Samuel Cousins. If all the unsatisfied subscribers had been able to receive a copy, the number sold would have been closer to a million copies. Several thousand pounds had to be returned to customers who threatened to sue over non-delivery of the print and the popularity of the painting spread like wild fire. Subsequent prints of the painting created enormous demand for the print and as Millais’ son wrote:

’Thanks to the engraver’s and woodcutter’s art, "Cherry Ripe" found its way into the remotest parts of the English-speaking world, and everywhere that sweet presentment of English Childhood won the hearts of the people. From Australian miners, Canadian backwoodsmen, South African treckers, and all sorts and conditions of colonial residents, came to the artist letters of the warmest congratulation, some of which stirred his heart by the deep emotion it expressed.