I wish this Millais painting would have been included in the exhibition. No doubt, there were all kinds of reasons that it wasn't. The Yale Center for British Art is amazing. Make a trip. It's free. In some ways, New Haven is like a miniature DC when it comes to free and easily accessible cultural resources.
When I first saw this painting I was struck by the radical oddness of both Millais's composition and his palette. Actually, at first I was simply struck. It's a weird painting. The purple-black mass at the center is remarkable in itself. But then I started to see it as a monogram, as a massive M, a giant signature covering the sleeping child. Here, perhaps, is a move toward imagining the painted canvas as something other than unmediated support. I wouldn't walk this idea too far down (to begin with I just thought of it). I don't know Millais scholarship, so maybe this is a commonplace observation. While it's true that this "M" doesn't resemble the bow shape of his signature M (see below), an M is an M nonetheless. It is this kind of reading, maybe reckless, that I craved during the symposium and found largely wanting.
Millais loved signing his paintings. Remember his Isabella and the big PRB carved into the base of the front table leg. (This is one of the crucial paintings that didn't make the cut in the DC version.) I looked somewhat exhaustively, but I didn't see any PRB signatures in the exhibition (which only appeared in the early work, in any case). Here's a fascinating (and partial) geneology of Millais's signatures:
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