Millais’ Metapicture: The North-West Passage as Distillate of Arctic Voyaging from the Anglosphere

John Guille Millais reported in his 1899 biography of his famous father, John Everett Millais, that The North-West Passage (1874) was “perhaps the most popular of all Millais’ paintings at the time”. The picture’s adoptive subtitle—“It might be done, and England should to do it”, purportedly uttered by the aged sailor in the painting—captured the patriotic zeal for the British Arctic Expedition of 1875–1876, rather than the past glories (and tragedies) of the British quest to traverse the Northwest Passage. “It” in this motto looks ahead to the planting of the British flag at the North Pole and to the treatment of the Arctic in contemporary art. Looking closely at this complex painting and its surrounding discourses in the Victorian period and in related works from our own time, I argue that The North-West Passage was and remains a “metapicture” that distilled speculation on Arctic voyaging from the Anglosphere in the 1870s and does so again today.