Autumn Leaves is possibly Deerstalkers favorite painting by John Everett Millais. The beauty of the young girls is set in contrast to the dying leaves. Youth, Millais tells us, is a passing thing. At best it can hope to grow old and die. It is a fundamentally pagan picture.The painting is said to be inspired by at visit to Tennyson i 1854 and by his poem The Princess, from which the following lines are taken:
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking on the days that are no more.
There remains, though, the riddle of the eldest girls left hand. Why does it look like a demon claw? Millais was as close to a photographer as a painter can get, so there is no doubt that it is intended to look like that. But why?
