Focus on The North-West Passage and explore the Creation.
Millais was keen to use Edward John Trelawny as the model for the figure of his old sailor. He had met him at the funeral of their mutual friend John Leech. Millais's wife Effie Gray persuaded Trelawny to sit for the picture by agreeing to attend a Turkish bath he was promoting at the time. The female figure was a professional model, Mrs Ellis, who was later used in another painting, Stitch, Stitch, Stitch (1876). The right side of the painting originally depicted two of the sailor's grandchildren, who were modelled by John and Alice Millais, two of Millais's own children. They were shown looking at a globe of the world. But after Millais completed the painting, he became unhappy with the figures of the children, thinking that they distracted the eye from the main figure. He cut out this section of the painting and replaced it with a screen, over which British naval flags are hung.The chart depicted in the painting is of the northern coast of Canada, as mapped during the Robert McClure expeditions of 1848–53. It was designed by Edward Augustus Inglefield and printed in 1854. Millais may have intended to suggest that the old man was a veteran of one of McClure's expeditions. The painting in the background depicting an ice-trapped ship (partly hidden by the flag) resembles images of McClure's ship HMS Investigator, which was abandoned by McClure and his crew in 1853 after three years of being trapped.When he saw the painting at the Royal Academy exhibition, Trelawny, who was teetotal, was outraged by the fact that Millais had included a glass of grog and a lemon. According to Millais's son John Guille Millais, he complained to his friends in the Albany Club that "that fellow Millais has handed me down to posterity with a glass of rum-and-water in one hand and a lemon in the other". However, he eventually decided that Millais's Scottish wife Effie was probably to blame because "the Scotch are a nation of sots".
Edward John Trelawny Robert McClure grog John Leech Edward Augustus Inglefield Effie Gray John Guille Millais