02 Works, CONTEMPORARY & 20th Century Interpretation of the Bible! The Vale of Rest, With Footnotes

Josh Honeyman, (b. 1976)

Millais''s Two Nuns/ The Vale of Rest, 2008 (diptych)

Mixed media on canvas

122 x76cm (each)

Private collection

This painting is Honeyman's interpretation of John Everett Millais' The Vale of Rest, below.

Josh Honeyman lives near Blackheath close to the highest point of the Blue Mountains. He takes us there, into visionary landscapes, reimagining the world through a host of signs, symbols and haunting scenarios. Arcane narratives are suggested, ones steeped in myth, portents and divinations. There's love, death, poetry, mystery, wizardry, far beyond anything the camera can offer. The fact that Honeyman is a highly skilled painter allows him to convince us of the validity of these alternative realms. Let's go there, not all the time, but long enough to recognise that the human spirit is more than just a receptacle for the banal pragmatism and dull conventions of Western rationalism. Robert Hollingworth, 2019

Josh studied at the College of Fine Arts, Sydney. He has exhibited in a range of solo and group shows across Australia and in Los Angeles, USA in 2006.

John Everett Millais, (1829–1896)

The Vale of Rest

Oil on canvas

1029 x 1727 mm

Tate Britain

Art critic Tom Lubbock said of the painting:

"Graves. Dusk. A walled enclosure. The spooky, looming trees. Nuns. Catholics (in England then, still an object of suspicion). Sexual segregation. Religiosity. Mistress and servant, a power relationship, maybe some deeper emotional bondage. Female labour. Something being buried or exhumed. Twin wreaths. The deep dark earth. Corpses, secrets, conspiracy, fear. It's a picture that pulls out all the stops." More on this painting

Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet, (8 June 1829 – 13 August 1896) was an English painter and illustrator. he was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

A child prodigy, at the age of eleven Millais became the youngest student to enter the Royal Academy Schools. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded at his family home in London. Millais became the most famous exponent of the style, his painting Christ in the House of His Parents (1850) generating considerable controversy. By the mid-1850s Millais was moving away from the Pre-Raphaelite style and developing a new and powerful form of realism in his art. His later works were enormously successful, making Millais one of the wealthiest artists of his day. While early 20th-century critics, reading art through the lens of Modernism, viewed much of his later production as wanting, this perspective has changed in recent decades, as his later works have come to be seen in the context of wider changes and advanced tendencies in the broader late-nineteenth-century art world.

Millais's personal life has also played a significant role in his reputation. His wife Effie was formerly married to the critic John Ruskin, who had supported Millais's early work. The annulment of the marriage and her wedding to Millais have sometimes been linked to his change of style, but she became a powerful promoter of his work and they worked in concert to secure commissions and expand their social and intellectual circles. More on Sir John Everett Millais

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