Steps in a Garden (1860): Art, History and Details

Steps in a Garden (1860) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is William Henry Millais (British, 1828–1899).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

William Henry Millais was closely associated with the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He sketched extensively from nature in the early 1850s. Here, Millais painted a sequestered landscape of rough-hewn steps ascending a shady slope. A smattering of light pierces a dense canopy of trees, allowing little to flourish except for the foxgloves that adorn the foreground. Ivy growing on the hillside, a decaying stump, and moss-covered steps suggest the passage of time.

Object facts

• Title: Steps in a Garden
• Date: 1860
• Creator attribution: William Henry Millais (British, 1828–1899)
• Culture: England, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: watercolor and gouache with scratch-away technique to create highlights on sturdy-weight wove paper mounted to same by artist with color tests in margins of mount
• Dimensions: Sheet: 33.8 x 26 cm (13 5/16 x 10 1/4 in.); Secondary Support: 39 x 32.4 cm (15 3/8 x 12 3/4 in.)
• Collection: DR - British
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2013.240

A detail from the museum

William Henry Millais's brother John Everett was a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood and encouraged the older artist to pursue landscape as a subject.

Collection credit

Gift in memory of Helen Borowitz

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lemonedes, Heather. British Drawings: The Cleveland Museum of Art. Exh. Cat. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2013.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.