SIR JOHN MILLAIS
Forthe 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 thereaboutsof 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 headshipof 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 neveras 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 calledThe 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 ofpoetic 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, dominatingit, 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-WestPassage,’ 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 SirJoshua 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.)