PLATE VII.—OPHELIA(Tate Gallery)Realism more searching and more significant than that which Millais sought for and attained in this small canvas would hardly come within the bounds of possibility. But the picture is much more than a simple study of facts; it has an exquisite charm of poetic feeling, and it is conceived with a full measure of the tenderness needed in a representation of the most pathetic of all Shakespeare’s heroines. Such a work has a place, definite and indisputable, among the classics of art, and counts as one of the chief masterpieces of the British School.PLATE VII.—OPHELIA
(Tate Gallery)
Realism more searching and more significant than that which Millais sought for and attained in this small canvas would hardly come within the bounds of possibility. But the picture is much more than a simple study of facts; it has an exquisite charm of poetic feeling, and it is conceived with a full measure of the tenderness needed in a representation of the most pathetic of all Shakespeare’s heroines. Such a work has a place, definite and indisputable, among the classics of art, and counts as one of the chief masterpieces of the British School.
The years over which his activity as an exponent of pure landscape extended are, however, memorable because they saw the production of some of the most triumphant achievements of his maturer life. With his two landscapes, “Flowing to the Sea,” and “Flowing to the River,” he exhibitedin 1872 his “Hearts are Trumps,” a portrait group which has become a modern classic; and in 1873 another wonderful portrait, the three-quarter length of “Mrs. Bischoffsheim.” But it was in 1874 that he showed what is in many ways the greatest of all his paintings, “The North-West Passage,” a work which, if he had done nothing else of moment, would suffice to place him securely among the master painters of the world. The head of the old man, who is the central figure in the picture, is entirely magnificent, and there is much besides in this canvas which would have been beyond the reach of any one but an artist of almost abnormal power. This was followed in 1875 by his portrait of “Miss Eveleen Tennant,” and in 1877 by the “Yeoman of the Guard,” which runs“The North-West Passage” close in the race for supremacy.
At this time, indeed, his productiveness was extraordinary; subject pictures, portraits, and landscapes appeared in rapid succession, and in all of them he kept to a level of masterly practice which other men reach only occasionally and at rare intervals. Between 1873 and 1879 he painted eight landscapes, all important in scale and interesting in treatment, but after 1879 he produced no more for nearly ten years, when he began a fresh series. He was apparently too busy with portraits and figure subjects to give much time to out-of-door work, and to satisfy the demands made upon him by art collectors and sitters he must have had to work his hardest. Yet popularity did not make himcareless, and his hard work diminished neither his freshness of outlook nor his freedom of expression. Conscientiousness as a craftsman was always one of his virtues, and the knowledge that he had a host of admirers ready to accept almost anything he would give them had certainly not the effect of inducing him to lower his standard.
In the long list of his paintings, which belong to the period beginning in 1879 and ending in 1888, several stand out with special prominence—for example, his portraits of “Mrs. Jopling,” and “The Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone,” “Cherry Ripe,” and “The Princess Elizabeth,” all in 1879, “The Right Hon. John Bright” in 1880, “Cardinal Newman,” “Alfred, Lord Tennyson,” “Sir Henry Thompson,” “Cinderella,” and “Caller Herrin’,” in 1881, “J. C. Hook, R.A.,” and “The Captive,” in 1882, “The Marquess of Salisbury” in 1883, “The Ruling Passion,” and another portrait of Gladstone, in 1885, “Bubbles” in 1886, and “The Marquess of Hartington” in 1887. Some of these were shown at the Academy, but he was producing far more year by year than could be exhibited there, so he sent many important works to the Grosvenor Gallery, and most of his subject pictures to the galleries of the dealers by whom they were commissioned.
After 1888 there was some relaxation in his effort; in that year he had at the Academy only one picture, a landscape, “Murthly Moss,” and only one portrait in each of the years 1889 and 1890, though he showed several works in other galleries.In 1892 his landscapes “Halcyon Weather,” and “Blow, Blow, thou Winter Wind,” were at the Academy, but after that year he worked no more out-of-doors. Of the canvases painted during the last three or four years of his life, the most memorable are his portrait of “John Hare” (1893), “Speak! Speak!” (1895), and “A Forerunner” (1896), all of which were at the Academy, and “Time the Reaper” which was at the New Gallery in 1895. “Speak! Speak!” was purchased by the Chantrey Fund trustees, and is now in the National Gallery of British Art with the other admirably chosen examples of his art which were given to the nation by Sir Henry Tate.
The crowning honour of his life came to him in February 1896, when he waselected President of the Royal Academy in succession to Lord Leighton—an honour which was particularly appropriate not only because of his eminence as an artist, but also because he had been intimately connected for nearly sixty years with the institution over which he was then called to preside. To this connection he referred in his speech at the Academy banquet in 1895, at which he took the chair in the place of Leighton whose illness prevented him from occupying his accustomed position. The words which Millais used on this occasion expressed generously and affectionately his sense of obligation to the Academy by which he had been trained in his boyhood, and from which he had received encouragement and support at the most critical period of his career, and declared with characteristic frankness that he owed to it a debt of gratitude which he never could repay.
PLATE VIII.—THE NORTH-WEST PASSAGE(Tate Gallery)Even if the “North-West Passage” were not the masterly piece of painting that it is, it would still be a picture of importance because it appeals so vividly to the national spirit of adventure. The old Arctic explorer, no longer able to satisfy his still strenuous inclinations, listens to the record of his past activities which is being read to him by his daughter, and yearns once more to battle with the hardships which must be faced by the traveller in the frozen north. The old man’s head, one of the finest technical achievements in modern art, was painted from Trelawny, the friend of Byron, and Shelley.PLATE VIII.—THE NORTH-WEST PASSAGE
(Tate Gallery)
Even if the “North-West Passage” were not the masterly piece of painting that it is, it would still be a picture of importance because it appeals so vividly to the national spirit of adventure. The old Arctic explorer, no longer able to satisfy his still strenuous inclinations, listens to the record of his past activities which is being read to him by his daughter, and yearns once more to battle with the hardships which must be faced by the traveller in the frozen north. The old man’s head, one of the finest technical achievements in modern art, was painted from Trelawny, the friend of Byron, and Shelley.
To those, however, who know how loyal he was to the institution that he loved so well it would seem that the debt was, indeed, fully paid. Few men have done more to uphold the repute of the Academy, few have by the brilliancy of their powers and their charm of personality done it more credit. That Leighton was the ideal President can be readily admitted, but Millais, as his successor, would have carried on a great tradition with dignity and sympathy and with no diminution of his predecessor’s generous tolerance and earnest sense of artistic responsibility. He would have kept the Academy on broad lines, and by his impatience of empty formalitieshe would have prevented it from losing touch with the movements in modern art.
But, unfortunately, he was destined to hold his honourable office for but a brief time. Even before Leighton’s death he had been suffering from a throat trouble which not long after was pronounced to be cancer; and in the months that followed immediately on his election the disease made rapid progress. Not long after the opening of the 1896 Academy Exhibition his condition became so serious that an immediately fatal result was expected; but by an operation he obtained some temporary relief and his life was prolonged for a few weeks. This, however, was only a brief respite; he died on August 13, and was buried a week later in St. Paul’sCathedral, where little more than six months before he had followed his old friend’s body to the grave.
To speak of his death as premature would be scarcely a misapplication of the word. Although Millais had completed his sixty-seventh year he was still in art a young man. His vigour had not waned, and there was no perceptible diminution of his artistic vitality even in those last works which he painted under the shadow of nearly impending death. To a man of his splendid physique and buoyant temperament age would have come slowly, and the inevitable degeneration of his powers would have not begun for many more years. The possibility of great achievement remained to him, and it would be true to say that his death robbed us of much which wouldhave added greatly to the sum total of British art. Yet we may be grateful to fate for allowing him to develop the promise of his youth in the splendour of his maturer years; it is so often the lot of the precocious genius to die young with his mission but half fulfilled. If death had come to Millais as it did to Bonington or Fred Walker, our loss would have been sad indeed.
In discussing Millais as an artist the part which his personality played in making him what he was must by no means be overlooked. Something of the vitality and the virility of his art was due to the way in which he kept touch with the life about him, and interested himself in people and things. He was no recluse who fed in secret upon his own ideas, or narrowedhis outlook by hedging himself round with prejudices and preferences for one special class of artistic material. Instead, he went out into the world and acquired his impressions of humanity in all directions and at first hand, finding much pleasure in association with his fellow-men. To his own human nature he gave free rein; he was a keen sportsman, a lover of children—of whose ways he had, as he proved in scores of pictures, a perfect understanding—and a man who was always happy in congenial society, and always welcome. He lived his life, in fact, largely, genially, and wholesomely, and he was as much unspoiled by the prosperity which came to him in his maturer years as he was unshaken by the opposition which he had to face in that brief period of his youth when,as he used to say himself, he was “so dreadfully bullied.”
That this brief taste of unpopularity did him good rather than harm can well be imagined, for without making him bitter it tested with some severity his tenacity and his power to fight vigorously for what he believed to be right—and such a test has always its value as a means of developing the finer qualities of a strong man, or as a warning to the weak one of the need for self-examination. Millais did not require any incentive to self-examination, because he knew well enough what he intended to do when he deliberately set up his own conviction against that of the men who practically ruled British art, and he did not enter upon the fight with any idea of backing out if he found it was likely togo against him. But after the kind of triumphal progress which he made through the Academy schools, the discovery that the wider public was not disposed to accept him as infallible was possibly necessary to prove to him that successes as a student did not give him, as a matter of course, an assured place among the chiefs of his profession. He was taught roughly, and in a way that roused both his fighting spirit and his pride, that this position was to be won only by sustained and strenuous effort; and this lesson he never forgot. Its effects persisted long after he had become a popular favourite, and they helped, it can be fairly believed, to strengthen his character and to keep him from that easy contentment with his own works which is the first step towards degeneration. He didnot degenerate after he had secured what he had been striving for; although he had silenced his critics, and had won them over to his side, he continued to sit in severest judgment upon himself, and to the last he exacted from his own capacities the utmost they could give him.
The plates are printed byBemrose & Sons, Ltd., Derby and LondonThe text at theBallantyne Press, Edinburgh