A seminar to be held at the Bedingfield Room, Bar Convent, Blossom Street, on Tuesday 4 November at 10.30am. Over two sessions, 10.30 – 11.15 and 11.45 – 12.30 with a break for coffee and cookie, the speaker, Maddie Hewitson will explore Jephthah, one of John Everett Millais’ major religious paintings.

This talk will explore Jephthah (1867) by John Everett Millais, one of the artist’s major religious paintings. Drawing its subject from Judges 11, it depicts the moment the Israelite general Jephthah realises that his vow to God has, tragically, condemned his daughter to death by his own hand. The painting explores the emotional depths of the story, with layered expressions and gestures that exemplify the intense psychological detail typical of Millais’s later work. Millais imagines the biblical world through the global and imperial lens of Victorian Britain. I argue that he used Black, Jewish, and mixed-race models, among them the Jamaican-born Fanny Eaton, to populate a Protestant imaginary that was being reshaped by biblical criticism, archaeological discovery, and increased contact with the Middle East. In Jephthah, this results in a striking visualisation of the ancient world that is both culturally hybrid and theologically charged. The talk will situate this work within a wider resurgence of interest in Old Testament narratives among Victorian artists, examining how Scripture was reinterpreted across British art and design in response to contemporary religious, racial, and imperial discourses. Maddie Hewitson

The speaker, Maddie Hewitson, is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies at the University of Birmingham, having graduated from the University of York where she obtained her BA, MA and PhD. She specialises in nineteenth-century British art and was recently research assistant at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford for the exhibition ‘Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion and Design.