The Rescue

The Rescue is an oil painting on canvas by John Everett Millais, dated 1855 and held by the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, which acquired it through the Felton Bequest and received it in 1924.

The National Gallery of Victoria describes it as Millais's first painting of a contemporary subject. He had seen a fireman die during a rescue, and he wrote, 'Soldiers and sailors have been praised a thousand times. My next picture shall be of firemen.' The choice was topical: fire brigades had only recently changed from private companies protecting property into a public service whose first duty was to save lives. Millais travelled across London to watch firemen at work, then built an arrangement in his studio to recreate the light of a fire, burning wood to fill the room with smoke and placing a sheet of coloured glass between himself and his models to imitate the red glare. This concern with passing effects of light and colour was new in his work.

A fireman carries three children out of a burning house and down the stairs to their kneeling mother, who stretches out her arms to receive them. Critics remarked on the sharp shifts of colour, notably the mother's sleeve turning from slate blue to pale pink in the firelight. The historian Robyn Cooper has argued that some unease about the picture came from its showing a strong working-class man saving middle-class children while their father is absent.

Millais counted the picture among his best and sent it to the Royal Academy in 1855, where John Ruskin called it 'the only great picture exhibited this year; but this is very great.' It was planned as a companion to The Order of Release, 1746, and was bought from the artist by the same collector, Joseph Arden. After his death it passed through sales at Christie's to Holbrook Gaskell and Charles Fairfax Murray before being acquired for Melbourne in 1923. The canvas measures 121.5 by 83.6 cm.