For the second time within a few months the Royal Academy has lost
its chief, while English Painting is deprived of its most popular
representative, and contemporary English Art of one who was long its
most vigorous and most varied personality. Born at Southampton in 1829,
the ‘son of John William Millais, Esquire, by Mary, daughter of Richard
Evemy, Esquire’--as the official biographies relate--Millais was really
the descendant of a Jersey family of long standing; but in character,
personal and professional, he was typically English. It is partly by
reason of the fact that, as a man and as an artist, Millais summed up
some, perhaps, of the defects, many certainly of the great qualities,
of our English race, that his popularity amongst all personal
associates, and amongst the spectators of his decisive, strenuous, and
eager work, was won so early, and has been so firmly held.
The man himself, during forty years or thereabouts of active adult
life--the artist during forty years of scarcely relaxed endeavour--has
been in thought, in conduct, in taste, and in production, pre-eminently
healthy. Millais, in the generation and a half of his active life--for
he began young--had seen fashions good and bad, foolish and reasonable,
rise and pass away; but, save by the influences of his quite early
days, the days of the Pre-Raphaelites, he has been practically
unaffected. He has developed in the direction proper to himself. As
time has passed, he and his sympathies have broadened and modified,
and if we miss in much of the later work the intense and concentrated
poetry of the earlier, that later work has qualities of its own that
do something to compensate. The man himself, too--sportsman, man of
the world, excellent comrade, hearty and sincere good fellow--has been
essentially greater in his more recent than in his earlier times; for
the temptations of a success, brilliant and uninterrupted, did him,
as a man at least, little harm. Simple and generous he was--by all
the records of his fellows--when he was at ‘Mr. Sass’s Academy’ fifty
years ago. Simple and generous--generous especially in thought and
judgment as well as in action--he remained, when in the late winter
of the present year he was appointed to the visible headship of the
profession to which he had given so much of the energy of his life.
Sir John Millais was only nine years old when he gained his first medal
at the Society of Arts--Mozart himself scarcely came before the public
in more tender years, as an executant upon the limited keyboard of his
day--and when he was seventeen, ‘Jack’ Millais was already an exhibitor
at the Academy. He was only twenty when his ‘Isabella,’ from the poem
of Keats, disclosed a new talent, almost a new order of talent; at
the least, a personality that had to be reckoned with--an influence
that had to be either accepted or fought against. Yet more marked
by an artistic individuality which was, in part, a return to older
conceptions and views than those of his day, were the ‘Carpenter’s
Shop,’ ‘Mariana in the Moated Grange,’ the ‘Huguenot,’ and ‘Ophelia.’
These, or most of them, are typical Pre-Raphaelite pictures--the
offspring of the tacit rebellion of a whole group of men, only one of
whom, Mr. Holman Hunt, remains to give effect in his later life to the
principles enunciated in youth. Dante Gabriel Rossetti--Pre-Raphaelite
to the end, though of course with certain modifications--was another of
those men; but years have passed since he went from us. The group was
completed by others never as celebrated, nor, as the world judges, so
successful. They painted their pictures; they made their illustrations;
they wrote as well as drew, in the quaint publication called _The
Germ_, which the lapse of time and the fad of the collector have since
made rare and valuable. Truth, rather than convention, was the aim of
their practice; but they were not peculiar in that,--all youth, if it
is earnest at all, is earnest for truth, or earnest rather for that
particular side of truth which happens just then to have been revealed,
and of which it exaggerates the value. Much has been written about the
Pre-Raphaelite ‘movement’ and its supreme importance--as if it were a
great religious Reformation and a French Revolution rolled into one.
In History it is destined to be remembered because it was a phase
through which two or three men of genius passed--a something, moreover,
that for the moment welded them together. It will not be recollected,
because at a later time mere imitative weaklings, by the dozen, made
feeble fight under what they professed to be its banner.
The interest, then, for sensible people, in Millais’s early pictures,
lies, not in the fact that they were Pre-Raphaelite, but in the fact
that they showed, many of them, an intensity of vision, a profundity
of poetic feeling, which is the property of gifted and of eager youth.
The passionate, constant devotion--the devotion of a minute which
lasts, you feel, for a lifetime; the ‘moment eternal,’ as the great
poet puts it--of the Puritan Maiden and of the Cavalier she helps, is
the interest of the ‘Concealed Royalist.’ The burning love-affair of
the ‘Huguenot’ is the interest of a canvas on which, before the days
when the aesthete had invented ‘intensity’ of attitude, Millais had
determined that his lovers should be intense, instead of sentimental.
Millais was in those years occupied very much with the presentation,
never of strictly sensuous enjoyment (Rossetti’s field, rather than
his), but of violent emotion, and uncontrolled, almost uncontrollable,
impulse. His people felt keenly, but with the elevation of poetic
natures, or of a poetic mood. And Millais painted them when their blood
ran high. He chose the incident that seemed to him the most dramatic
in all their story. He painted them on the crest of the wave--at the
moment of crisis.
This, however, like the more naïve Pre-Raphaelitism of a yet earlier
time, was but a phase--remarkable now chiefly because it has been so
absolutely outlived; nay, because so much of the view of life taken
subsequently by its author has, dominating it, a spirit so opposed
to this one. But the transition was not rapid: the ‘Autumn Leaves’
of 1856, and the ‘Vale of Rest’ of 1860, have, at least, the poetic
quality to the full, though with no violence of emotion. Rather, they
are suggestive and reticent; weird and extraordinarily expressive: in
the one there is depicted the wistfulness of childhood, in the other
the melancholy resignation of a nun to whom ‘rest’ means brooding on a
Past more eventful and more poignant than the occupation of her present
day.
Notwithstanding his later technical development, nothing that Sir John
Millais has painted will be remembered more definitely and firmly than
these; and it is noteworthy that they are among the first pictures
in which he relied in great measure upon landscape to express or
suggest the sentiment which it was the picture’s business to convey.
‘Spring Flowers’ of 1860 was in a lighter and gayer vein, if it is,
as we believe, the picture known originally as ‘Apple Blossom’--girls
lounging in an orchard under the loaded and whitened boughs. ‘My First
Sermon,’ in 1863, was more purely popular than anything we have named.
It dealt with childhood almost in the spirit of Édouard Frère, but
with its author’s singular realism of execution. ‘Vanessa,’ in 1869,
marked Millais as occupied increasingly with technical problems--with
the attainment of an almost novel boldness of effect. It is, like so
many pieces of his middle and later middle time, brilliant in colour
and brush-work. No one now thinks, we suppose, of claiming it as
dramatic--that is, of connecting it especially with the character of
the lady who came off second-best in the affections of Swift.
Very soon after the exhibition of ‘Vanessa,’ Millais, who had already
sought impressiveness in landscape background, turned to pure landscape
as a theme sufficient for the exercise of his art. He gave us then
‘Chill October,’ the October of the north and of the lowlands, with
the wind passing over water, and the reeds and scanty foliage bent
aside by its breath. The picture excited interest. It was visibly
forcible. The conception of the scene, too, was unusual and, of
course, unconventional; but in some later landscape work, Millais may
have been at once nearer to Nature and nearer to the attainment of a
perfected art. ‘New Laid Eggs,’ in 1873, with naïveté of expression
and dexterity of handling, but with a rusticity not very convincing,
was a ‘taking’ picture of happy, healthy, self-confident girlhood. Its
importance, in the volume of its author’s work, was quite eclipsed the
following year by the ‘North-West Passage,’ a canvas full of interest
almost romantic, yet most direct in its record of character--the main
figure being, indeed, a portrait of that Trevelyan who is associated
in most men’s minds with the career of Shelley. He it was who in Sir
John Millais’s picture posed as the sturdy sailor whose imagination
engages him in a remote and unknown voyage. When, many years after
it had been painted, the ‘North-West Passage’ was seen again in the
Millais Exhibition, at the Fine Art Society’s or at the Grosvenor
Gallery, it was felt that at the moment of its execution the painter
had reached the summit of his real artistic greatness, the masculine
and potent hand here best executing that which had been prompted by a
mind at its most vigorous. ‘A Jersey Lily,’ in 1878, was a tribute to
the then girlish beauty of Mrs. Langtry, who at about the same period
was recorded by Mr. Watts with exquisite simplicity. Again, just as
in his diploma picture it had pleased Millais to invoke the name of
Velasquez, and to perform a feat such as that to which Velasquez was
most wont to address himself, so, in another canvas, in one sense
more important--that of the three Miss Armstrongs playing whist with
a dummy--it pleased him to follow visibly in the steps of Sir Joshua
Reynolds--recalling his composition; the portrait group of the three
Ladies Waldegrave being the one with which he on this occasion made
it his business to vie. In 1879 Sir John was able to exhibit one of
the masterpieces of portraiture--that record or idealisation of Mr.
Gladstone of which the nobility and charm were instantly recognised--a
canvas which of itself would be sufficient to prove that the faculty
of poetic vision never finally deserted an artist who had seemed of
late to concentrate his energy rather on dexterous execution than on
the expression of profound feeling or elevated mood. The ‘Mr. Bright,’
which pretty closely followed the ‘Gladstone,’ was comparatively
unsuccessful. And the illness of the sitter and the consequent
incompleteness of his presentation on Millais’s canvas, made yet more
disappointing the portrait of Lord Beaconsfield which hung upon the
walls of the Academy in 1881. Next year, however, came the ‘Cardinal
Newman,’ to atone for all that had been amiss--again a poetic vision, a
worthy rising to the exigencies of a great theme, a performance at once
decisive and tender, energetic, yet exquisitely suave.
(_Standard_, 14th August 1896.)