The Black Brunswicker

The Black Brunswicker is an oil painting on canvas by John Everett Millais, completed in 1860 and now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery at Port Sunlight, part of National Museums Liverpool.

The Black Brunswickers were a volunteer corps raised in 1809 by Frederick William, Duke of Brunswick, known for the death's-head badge on their caps; they suffered heavy losses at Quatre Bras in the Waterloo campaign of 1815. Millais took up the subject after talking it over with William Howard Russell, war correspondent of The Times, and told his wife Effie in a letter that the costume and incident were so powerful he was astonished no one had painted them before. In the same letter he called it a pendant to A Huguenot, his first great success, and the picture is widely read as an attempt to repeat that work's formula after a less successful period.

The scene appears to be set on the night of the Duchess of Richmond's ball, when officers left to join their troops. A young soldier pulls the door open while the woman in a ballgown presses against it to keep him back; her small dog, wearing a red ribbon like hers, looks up at them. On the wall hangs an engraving after Jacques-Louis David's Napoleon Crossing the Alps, a reminder of Waterloo that also pointed to Napoleon III's campaign in northern Italy in 1859. Kate, daughter of Charles Dickens, posed for the woman and a private of the Life Guards for the soldier; they never sat together, each leaning on a lay figure instead. Millais spent about three months on the canvas and took care over the uniform, while the dress mixes the fashions of 1809 and 1815.

The dealer Ernest Gambart paid 1,000 guineas, the highest price Millais had yet received, and sold it to the collector Thomas Plint; at the Plint sale at Christie's in 1862 it fetched 780 guineas. William Hesketh Lever bought it in 1898. T. L. Atkinson engraved it in mezzotint in 1864. The canvas measures 104 by 68.5 cm.