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Trophies of empire: exotic props in two paintings by John Everett Millais

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This talk focuses on unexamined links between the artists John Everett Millais (1829–96) and Edward Angelo Goodall (1819–1908). It describes how a range of Indigenous artworks collected by Goodall while working as the illustrator of a colonial boundary survey of British Guiana during the 1840s became the basis for two Millais paintings: Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru (1846) and The Boyhood of Raleigh (1870). Close object identifications using written and pictorial expedition sources combined with anthropological literature and British Museum collection records, highlight connections between Millais’s production and histories of British colonialism in the Guayana region. Particular attention will be paid to a featherwork headdress, which appears in both paintings, but has often been misidentified as a basket in The Boyhood of Raleigh, and consequently not recognized as the same object used for the Inca imperial crown in the earlier work. These visible and material connections will be considered in relation to Ralegh’s fantastical writings, which linked Guayana to Peru via El Dorado mythology, and informed his historiographic reconstruction as an icon of British imperialist masculinity during the 1840s-60s.

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