The Martyr of the Solway

What you are looking at

A young woman with a cascade of long red hair stands in front of a dark, rising sea. Her hands are pulled behind her back. A heavy iron chain is wrapped around her waist, binding her loose pink blouse, flecked with small red dots, to something we cannot quite see, a stake or a rock, the edge of which looms at the right. Her blue-and-green plaid skirt is just visible at the bottom of the frame. She does not look at us. Her head is turned toward her left shoulder, her eyes downcast and red-rimmed, her lips pressed together. Behind her the sky is low and grey, and the water at the lower left is already breaking white.

This is The Martyr of the Solway, painted in 1871 by John Everett Millais. It depicts Margaret Wilson, an eighteen-year-old executed for her religious convictions in 1685. The canvas is 70.5 by 56.5 centimeters and hangs in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

Who was Margaret Wilson?

Margaret Wilson came from Wigtownshire in southwest Scotland. She was a Covenanter, one of the Scottish Presbyterians who refused to accept the authority of the Crown over their church during the reigns of Charles II and James VII (James II of England), years remembered in Scotland as the "Killing Time." When she and an older woman, Margaret McLachlan, refused to swear an oath recognizing the king as head of the church, they were sentenced to death by drowning.

In May 1685 the two women were tied to stakes in the tidal waters of the Solway Firth near Wigtown and left for the sea to rise over them. Accounts say the older woman was placed farther out, in the hope that seeing her die would make the younger one recant. Margaret Wilson refused. The "Wigtown Martyrs" became central figures of Scottish Presbyterian memory, though some historians have questioned whether a reprieve was granted and whether the drowning took place as described. The story was firmly established by the Victorian period.

Looking closely

The painting is almost a portrait. Millais leaves out nearly all the narrative clues: there is no crowd, no executioner, no second victim. The chain at her waist is the only sign of what is about to happen. Everything else is concentrated on the girl's face and hair.

Look at the paint. The blouse is handled with loose, broken strokes, its creases and dots dashed in quickly. The hair is a rich, swirling mass of auburn and copper, painted with the same love of texture Millais brought to his Pre-Raphaelite pictures twenty years earlier. The sea and sky, by contrast, are dark and summary. The cold greys behind make the warm hair and skin glow.

The expression is the hardest thing to read and the most deliberate. She is not defiant and not terrified; she seems sad, inward, perhaps ashamed. That ambiguity has a strange explanation.

A face borrowed from another painting

In 1870 Millais exhibited The Knight Errant, one of his rare nudes, showing a knight freeing a naked woman tied to a tree. The woman originally looked out at the viewer, and critics found her direct gaze immodest. The picture did not sell. Millais cut out the section of canvas with her head and torso and repainted the figure in The Knight Errant turned away. He then reused the excised piece, now clothed, as the core of The Martyr of the Solway. X-ray images published in the Tate exhibition catalogue Exposed: The Victorian Nude (2001) show the inserted section of canvas.

So the downcast martyr began life as a nude, and the averted, demure look was a correction. Modern writers have pointed out the uneasy mixture this creates: a picture of religious heroism that also presents a beautiful, chained, vulnerable young woman to a largely male Victorian audience.

Origins in an 1862 illustration

The subject first appeared in Millais's work as a wood-engraved illustration for the magazine Once a Week, published in July 1862. There Margaret is shown full-length in the water, with seagulls overhead and a distant ship, her hair wind-tossed and her figure thin. The 1871 oil is more glamorous and more ambiguous, focused on beauty rather than the setting of her death.

Millais's interest in Scottish history may owe something to his wife, Effie Gray, who grew up in Perth; they spent long periods in Scotland. By 1871 he was one of the most successful painters in Britain, long past the radical days of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood but still drawn to stories of doomed young women, as in his early masterpiece Ophelia.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool (WAG 2123), given in 1895 by George Holt, a Liverpool shipowner and collector. The Walker has one of the best collections of Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite art in Britain. For related works of martyrdom and suffering, see Death in Art and our guide to famous paintings of women.