Portrait of Effie Millais

The picture was acquired partly for its local associations. Euphemia Chalmers Gray, born in 1828, was the daughter of George Gray, a Writer to the Signet, of Bowerswell, Perth. In 1848 she married John Ruskin, whose parents were old friends of her father, but the marriage was not a success and was dissolved in 1854. The following year she married the young Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais. She died in 1898 and is buried in Kinnoul Church in Perth. The artist originally painted his youngest son, John Guille Millais, seated on his mother's lap, but this figure was scraped out and the sitter now holds a copy of the Cornhill Magazine.