Autumn Leaves

Curator: John Everett Millais painted this oil on canvas, titled "Autumn Leaves," in 1856. You can find it here in the Manchester Art Gallery. Editor: Well, the colors just punch you right in the gut, don't they? A symphony of burnt oranges and melancholic purples. Makes me feel...wistful, like watching summer slip away. Curator: That wistfulness isn't accidental. Millais was a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who sought to capture the intensity of feeling and detail they found in early Renaissance art. Death, loss and transience were definitely themes they favored in light of rampant industrialization. Editor: I see what you mean, those girls gathering leaves...it's beautiful, but somber too. It almost looks like a funeral pyre of foliage, the way they build up into an autumnal tower. You can almost smell the bonfire, can’t you? What strikes me is each figure's sense of melancholy in the face of natural process...like, there is some sort of silent ritual unfolding. Curator: Absolutely. Think about it. England in the 1850s was undergoing immense social and economic change. "Autumn Leaves" speaks to anxieties around the vanishing rural idyll. We can consider gender roles in Victorian England through their specific task in nature: the women perform duties associated with this disappearing landscape as emblems of nature as a site for nostalgia. Editor: Vanishing indeed. But they also appear resigned in their tasks. They accept that winter is inevitably coming, so that lends an acceptance that strikes home, as that feeling creeps up, you know? When everything is tinged with knowing it will not always be this way? Curator: Exactly! And it’s more layered than simple acceptance. Note that one girl on the right is carrying apples which could imply something, either lost innocence of biblical knowledge, a simple act of a worker getting fed, there are a plethora of possibilities that should inspire questioning... Editor: Questioning is where it's at, right? That apple gives a narrative spice. I love that, you get these big waves of autumnal color but close up, you see those micro clues. Curator: Precisely; looking closely encourages consideration that disrupts normative viewing processes, and makes this canvas an icon for our contemporary anxieties with late stage capitalism. Editor: I’ll definitely ponder this longer when I am finished in this Gallery; such subtle emotional depths under a seemingly straightforward landscape.