Dew Drenched Furze

Millais painted Dew Drenched Furze in 1890, near the very end of his life, during a period in which he had largely moved away from the hard-edged, jewel-toned precision of his early Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood work and toward an increasingly atmospheric, loosely handled engagement with the Scottish landscape. He had been spending long autumns at Murthly and Birnam in Perthshire, and these late landscapes reflect both his physical immersion in that terrain and a deliberate turn toward mood over botanical record. The Royal Academy, which had once viewed the Brotherhood with suspicion, had by this point made Millais its President, elected in 1896 just months before his death. Critics of the 1890s were divided on these late works: admirers saw a painter who had transcended decorative finish for something more emotionally immediate, while detractors lamented what they read as a loosening of the discipline that had defined his Brotherhood years. In art-historical terms, the late landscapes occupy an interesting position between the residual Pre-Raphaelite impulse toward close natural observation and the broader late-Victorian taste for Tonalist atmosphere, aligning Millais with contemporaries who were rethinking the relationship between detail and mood in landscape painting.