Millais

There's a display of Millais' work in the Tate in London. He was a 19th Century British painter, one of the pre-Raphaelites. I wasn't aware that he painted landscapes in his later life, and Scottish landscapes at that.

What got me thinking was a comment on Newsnight Review of "pushing the Victorian colonialism to one side" and then looking at the paintings.

Link to the exhibition.
Link to Wikipedia article.

Can you really view art out of context of the politics of the day? Do the politics behind this work matter, or does the message carry across the years even after the original conflict has ended? If it doesn't matter for one piece, can politics matter for other works, especially if they are non-political works.