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John Millais’s Autumn Leaves (1856) has long been recognized as a painting that sets out to produce certain feelings in the spectator — feelings that are usually identified as very abstract ones of melancholy and loss. As such, it tends to be read either alongside contemporary poetry that seeks to evoke a similar response, or as a forerunner of the aesthetic turn of the 1860s. I examine first some of the general questions that surround the production of feeling and affect in relation to nineteenth-century painting, and argue for the importance of understanding aesthetically generated feeling in the context of the available vocabulary — both verbal and artistic — of its time. I acknowledge the importance of critical interpretations of Autumn Leaves that have been generated over the last couple of decades (especially in the work of Malcolm Warner, Jason Rosenfeld, and David Peters Corbett), and explore the grounds on which they are based. I expand the grounds on which we might consider this a work that depicts transience and transition, and that is, itself, stylistically transitional. But I consider it in a new light by reading it alongside other visual material that depicts the Crimean War, including paintings by Millais himself, John Dalbiac Luard, and Noel Paton; and I put it alongside contemporary photographs, especially those by James Fenton, which Luard drew to Millais’s attention. I also explore the importance of Autumn Leaves being painted in the Scottish town of Perth, which had many men involved in Crimean warfare. With a glance at Andrew Wyeth’s work, I look at the tension between explicit and implicit subject matter when it comes to representing feelings generated by the devastation of war, and argue that the melancholy evoked by Autumn Leaves may have its origins, at least in part, in the very specific circumstances in which it was not only painted, but in which it would initially have been viewed. By extension, this article is an argument for the necessity of understanding the historic specificity of feeling.

Feeling, Affect, Melancholy, Loss: Millais’s <i>Autumn Leaves</i> and the Siege of Sebastopol