John Everett Millais was a narrative painter at a time when Britain had a narrative it urgently needed to deconstruct. Between Turner's death in 1851 and Queen Victoria's in 1901, Britain was the world's economic and political powerhouse but produced art that was at best local and anecdotal, at worst saccharine and anachronistic. Millais, a leading Pre-Raphaelite turned society portraitist, illustrates why this was so, and that it was by no means disastrous.

It is pointless to sell Millais as an impressionist forerunner, as Tate Britain's new exhibition attempts to do, presenting the late, misty, unpeopled Scottish landscapes as a glorious climax. Pre-Raphaelitism shared with impressionism a rejection of idealising academicism and a need to react to the 19thcentury transformation from rural to urban society, but the results were very different. Millais led a national movement that unravelled through realistic narrative, touched with symbolism, how Victorian society responded to the unique, unprecedented, rushed, desperate demands of its industrial revolution, in canvases that were crystal-clear, entirely sincere, but full of painterly pleasure.