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Life of the Artist The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood Later Developments Last Years

The Art of Millais

The Chief Works of Millais in Public Galleries, etc.

Christ in the House of His Parents

A Souvenir of Velazquez

The Vale of Rest

Ophelia

Autumn Leaves

The North-West Passage

Thomas Carlyle

SIR JOHN MILLAIS

HIS LIFE

Although John Everett Millais was born, on June 8, 1829, at Portland Place, Southampton, his father was an inhabitant of Jersey, and a member of a family which had been settled in that island from a date anterior to the Norman conquest. The first five years of the child's life were spent in Jersey, but in 1835 he was taken by his parents to Dinan, in Brittany, where he began, by his sketches of the scenery of the place and the types of the people, to give the first convincing proofs of the remarkable artistic capacity that was in him. These early efforts were so surprising, and attracted so much attention outside his family circle, that when he was not more than nine years old he was brought to London for an expert opinion on his chances in the profession for which he seemed predestined. The President of the Royal Academy, Sir Martin Archer Shee, was consulted, and his encouraging declaration, that "Nature had provided for the boy's success," decided the future of the young artist, who was at once allowed to begin serious study.

In 1838 he entered the drawing-school in Bloomsbury which was carried on by Henry Sass, and regarded as the best available place for the training of budding genius. In the same year he took the silver medal of the Society of Arts, for a drawing from the antique, and caused quite a sensation when he appeared, at the distribution of the prizes, to receive his award from the Duke of Sussex, who was presiding. The surprise of the spectators is said to have been unbounded when "Mr. Millais" came forward, a small child in a pinafore, to answer to his name, and even the officials at first found it hard to believe that he could be really the winner of the medal.

So far his progress had been, from the point of view of his elder contemporaries, very promising and satisfactory. He had proved himself to be possessed of unusual gifts; and apparently historical art was to have in him an exponent of rather a rare type, a painter who would carry on its traditions with some degree of vitality. But really he had only been feeling his way, and, not having had time as yet to analyse his inclinations, he had temporarily accepted, with youthful imitativeness, the precepts of his teachers and fellow-students. It did not take him long to discover that he was on the wrong track, and to decide that there was in another direction a far better opportunity for the assertion of his own independent convictions.

About the middle of the year 1848, he, and his friends Rossetti and Holman Hunt, inspired partly by the example of Ford Madox Brown, and partly by their own study of the works of the Italian Primitives who, before the time of Raphael, had laboured with devout and simple naturalism, decided that the principles which guided the early masters were being deliberately ignored by the modern men. So these three youths agreed among themselves to break away from most of the regulations by which they had been bound in their student days and to formulate a new art creed of their own. From this agreement sprang into existence an association, that, despite the small number of its members, and the shortness of its life, has left upon the history of the British School a mark clear and ineffaceable.

THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, as this association was called by way of declaring the intentions and ambitions of the men who belonged to it, was formally constituted during the autumn of 1848. It included, in addition to the three originators, two other painters, James Collinson and F. G. Stephens; a sculptor, Thomas Woolner; and a writer, William Michael Rossetti, who acted as secretary of the Brotherhood. Ford Madox Brown never became a member, although he entirely sympathised with the artistic aims of the group, for he had, it is said, doubts concerning the utility of such a banding together, and was more inclined to favour independent action; but several other young painters, who were never formally of the company, gave it practical support, and openly adopted its methods. Indeed, the list of these outside sympathisers soon became a long one; it included such able workers as William Bell Scott, Arthur Hughes, Thomas Seddon, W. L. Windus, and W. H. Deverell, who were directly inspired by the beliefs of the Brotherhood, and if, as would be quite legitimate, it were extended to take in all the others whose first essays in art were controlled by Pre-Raphaelite principles, an astonishing number of artists who have reached high rank in their profession could be added to it.

But in January, 1850, the Brotherhood took a step that very effectually removed any doubts that were felt by the public about the meaning of such canvases. They began to issue a monthly magazine, called "The Germ," in which they and their friends stated with sufficient frankness what Pre-Raphaelitism really meant, and what were the opinions that they professed. As a commercial speculation the magazine must be reckoned a failure, for after the fourth number it ceased to be issued, and at no time had it any general circulation. It served its purpose, however, of making quite intelligible the creed of its promoters; and it gave to the world certain etchings of Holman Hunt, Collinson, Madox Brown, and Deverell, and much literary matter by Coventry Patmore, Woolner, W. B. Scott, F. G. stephens, the two Rossettis and their sister Christina, and some other writers. An etching was prepared by Millais for the fifth number, an illustration of a story that Dante Rossetti was to write; but this fifth number did not appear.

Alarm at this defiance, and perhaps an uneasy consciousness of the real strength of a movement that gave so little sign of yielding to pressure, drove the supporters of the existing condition of affairs to almost incredible lengths. They demanded that these canvases should be removed from the exhibition of the Academy, summarily expelled as outrages on good taste; they urged the students in the art schools to shun the Brotherhood and everyone connected with it; they descended to the lowest depths of misrepresentation, and drew the line at nothing in the way of exaggeration. Calm and critical judgment ceased, for the moment, to exist, and a hysterical absence of balance threw into confusion even the best ordered and judicious minds.

But after a little while things began to mend. The attack exhausted itself by its very excess of virulence; and here and there strong men came forward to champion the cause of the Pre-Raphaelites. Mr. Ruskin, especially, appeared in the arena as an enthusiastic advocate of an undertaking that was in every way calculated to appeal to his vivid sympathies. He declared with acute and prophetic insight that the pilloried artists were laying "the foundations of a school of art nobler than the world has seen for three hundred years." His explanations of their methods were just what were wanted to set people thinking. Some years, it is true, elapsed before his enthusiasm, and the dogged perseverance of the young men, finally converted the great majority of art lovers; but the conversion did come, and it was complete.

LATER DEVELOPMENTS

As a portrait painter also he developed superlative gifts, adding year by year to a collection of masterpieces unequalled by any of his contemporaries. He was fortunate in his sitters, and the list of his productions in this branch of art includes a large proportion of the most beautiful women and distinguished men who have graced the latter half of the century. He immortalised impartially leaders of fashion, pretty children, noted politicians, and people eminent in many professions; and in his rendering of these various types he missed nothing of the individuality and distinctive character with which each one was endowed. Here especially his Pre-Raphaelite training stood him in good stead; for the habit of close analysis and careful investigation had been so impressed upon him by the experiences of his youth, that his instinctive judgment was now perfectly reliable, and his ability to decide promptly and with certainty about the aspects of his subject which were fittest for pictorial record had become absolutely complete.

LAST YEARS

It was characteristic of him that the honours which were heaped upon him in his later years should have diminished neither the strength of his work nor the charm of his personality. Affectation or self-consciousness were the last things that were possible to such a nature with its almost boyish energy and magnificent vitality. Yet he had every reason to be proud of success that had come to him, not by fortunate chance, but as a result of his own tenacity. He was made an Officer of the Legion of Honour, and received the Medaille d'Honneur at the Paris International Exhibition, in 1878; the degree of D.C.L. was conferred upon him at Oxford in 1880, and at Durham in 1893; he was elected a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery in 1881, a Foreign Associate of the Acad?mie des Beaux Arts in 1882, and President of the Royal Academy in 1896; he was created a Baronet in 1885, and an Officer of the Order of Leopold in 1895; and was, besides, an Officer of the Order of St. Maurice, and the Prussian Order "Pour la M?rite," and a member of the Academies of Vienna, Belgium, Antwerp, and of St. Luke, Rome, and San Fernando, Madrid. He was one of the few Englishmen invited to contribute his portrait to the great collection of pictures of artists painted by themselves in the Uffizi Gallery at Florence. Such a record proves most cogently the manner in which the public estimate of his capacity changed as years went on; it is instructive to compare its unanimity of recognition with the story of the time when art teachers were urging their pupils to greet the name of Millais with hisses, and were holding up his work, and that of his associates, to the bitterest execration.

The post of President of the Royal Academy he held for only six months, for he succeeded Lord Leighton on February 20th, 1896, and died on 13th of August in the same year. His election, however, rounded off appropriately that long association with the Academy to which he referred in his speech at the 1895 banquet, at which he presided in the absence of Lord Leighton. "I must tell you briefly my connection with this Academy. I entered the Antique School as a probationer, when I was eleven years of age; then became a student in the Life School; and I have risen from stage to stage until I reached the position I now hold of Royal Academician: so that, man and boy, I have been intimately connected with this Academy for more than half a century. I have received here a free education as an artist--an advantage any lad may enjoy who can pass a qualifying examination--and I owe the Academy a debt of gratitude I never can repay. I can, however, make this return--I can give it my love. I love everything belonging to it; the casts I have drawn from as a boy, the books I have consulted in our Library, the very benches I have sat on." No other teaching institution had, indeed, had any part in his education; no other art society had given him assistance at a moment when the world was against him; and in no other direction had such practical belief in the greatness of his future been manifested. Truly, he owed a debt of gratitude to the Academy, and he repaid it by being ever one of its most active supporters, and by doing infinite credit to its best traditions.

Then, with painful suddenness, came the verdict of his doctors, that his case was hopeless. The throat trouble, that had been growing month by month more acute and distressing, was pronounced to be cancer and incurable. In June the disease had made such strides that the end seemed to be imminent, but an operation gave him some relief, and his life was prolonged till the middle of August, when at last death released him from his agony. He passed away at the house in Palace Gate, Kensington, which had been the scene of the many triumphs of his later years, dying as he had lived, full of courage and patience, fearing nothing, and meeting his fate with cheerful resignation. On August 20th, he was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral, beside his old friend Lord Leighton, whom only a few months before he had helped to lay to rest.

His death not only left a gap in the ranks of art, but it also took away, while he was yet in the full enjoyment of his powers, a man whose sterling qualities had attracted a host of friends. His frankness and honesty, his geniality and kindliness, and, above all, his manly wholesomeness, without taint of modern decadence or morbidity, endeared him to everyone with whom he came in contact. He was typically English, in the best sense, with all the physical and mental attributes that have enabled our race to dominate the world, a lover of the country, a good shot, a keen fisherman, and a fearless horseman. The very look of him, with his stalwart, well set-up figure, and handsome, self-reliant face, conveyed the impression of perfect health of mind and body, and declared the inexhaustible vigour of his nature.

HIS ART

With all his definiteness of opinion and sincere belief in the accuracy of his own judgment, Millais was too keenly alive to the varieties of nature, too earnest in his observation of the life about him, to fall into the mechanical habit of repeating himself. He was robust, modern and practical, a man whose instinct was active rather than contemplative; and he might even be said to be wanting in imagination, if by imagination is understood the capacity to evolve things curious and unusual out of the inner consciousness.

But if he lacked imagination in this sense, he more than made up for the deficiency by the exquisite acuteness of his insight into natural facts, and by the depth of his judgment about the essentials of art. He made no mistakes through ignorance or want of proper preparation; and he never failed because he grudged the preliminary thought needed to carry to success a great undertaking. Indeed, the one thing that he always preached was application, constant industry devoted to the task of finding out how work should be done. Carelessness he condemned; but he had no love for that type of performance which shows the trouble that the producer has taken over it. He contended, justly, that it was the duty of the artist to so master the executive details of his profession that his work should impress the spectator by its ready certainty rather than its conscientious toil.

The need to strive for the quality of freshness in technical expression was, however, very far from being the only thing he insisted upon. He had, as well, a strong belief in the importance of a definitely independent attitude with regard to choice of pictorial motive, and selection of suitable material. But beyond this he advocated special precautions against any narrowing of the artist's practice by too close adherence to one kind of picture. He once put this conviction into words of considerable significance. "Individuality is not all that should be looked to; a varied manner must be cultivated as well. I believe that however admirably he may paint in a certain method, or however perfectly he may render a certain class of subject, the artist should not be content to adhere to a speciality of manner or method. A fine style is good, but it is not everything--it is not absolutely necessary."

Certainly Sir John carried out these principles in his own production. He had many sides to his character as an artist, and used his powers of observation with splendid freedom. His popularity was gained not by the reiteration of any one set of ideas, but by showing himself equally capable in many forms of painting. In his figure pictures he was by turns dramatic, romantic, sternly realistic, and at times sentimental in a robust way; in his portraits he was incisive, direct, and accurate; in his landscapes precise, exact, and searchingly correct in his rendering of what was before him; and in his water-colours and drawings in black and white delightfully facile and ingenious. He had no speciality, and no set conviction that there was one particular thing he could do better than anything else; so that he never restrained his love of variety or bound himself by limitations based simply upon expediency.

In any classification of his works, the first place must necessarily be given to his figure paintings and portraits. Indeed, they make up the bulk of his achievement, and represent the fullest growth of his capacity. The history of his life is principally written in them. The charm of his personality distinguishes them all--a charm as evident in the simpler and more limited subjects as in those which made great demands upon his powers of invention and contrivance. There was never any suggestion that he did not honestly feel the motive with which he was dealing, or that he was not perfectly convinced that what he had chosen was worthy of record. If he failed, it was because he had misapprehended the suitability of his material, not because he had been trying to do something outside the range of his belief.

Yet it was to these very qualities that was due his occasional want of success in dealing with stronger themes. His dramatic pictures descended at times into an artlessness that was only redeemed from feebleness by its obvious sincerity. They failed because he concerned himself so much with matters of fact that he missed the greater possibilities of the subjects he had selected, and because in his desire to be real and convincing he forgot that there was a need to appeal to the imagination of people who would not be satisfied with plain statements.

Indeed, there was in every branch of his figure-painting some sufficient reason for his popularity, some distinct attractiveness of mental quality to add convincingly to the impression created by his superlative command over technicalities. He could be tender, dainty, and refined in his studies of children; serious and solemn in his symbolical compositions; pathetic, vigorous, and passionate by turns in his subject-pictures; and through all ran a vein of sentiment that was always wholesome, clean, and intelligible. He never affected to be influenced by feelings that were not honestly natural to him, nor did he pretend to represent anything that he did not believe in sincerely and without question. What he painted was invariably what he felt at the moment; and, whether it was a masterpiece or a comparative failure it expressed simply the appeal that the subject had made to him; and his response to this appeal was always unconventional and definite.

He trusted in the same way to a personal impression of his sitter when he set himself to paint a portrait. What he wanted was to show that he understood the individuality of the man or woman before him, and that his understanding had helped him to make clear to others the special idiosyncrasies that separated that man or woman from the ordinary crowd. Portraiture to him was a matter of observation, of receptiveness to suggestion, and acceptance of what was visible, rather than an artistic process which enabled him to give free scope to his inventive instincts.

That his preference for repose in representation did not lead the artist into a dry convention, or into any disregard of the essential points of difference between people, is very evident if a comparison is made of his chief portraits. Beneath their reserve appears a wonderful variety of manner, and a superb power of interpretation. They are studied, exact, and intensely real. No perfunctory labour is seen in them, and their value is diminished by no slurring over of the little things which help to define the more intimate characteristics of the modern man.

As a necessary consequence, however, of this manner of working, he never could be ranked among the inspired painters of the open air, nor could he ever be said to have dealt exhaustively with the problems presented by natural phenomena. He remained untouched by the subtleties of atmospheric effect, by the varieties of momentary illumination, or by the fleeting glories of aerial colour, which provide the student of nature's devices with the chief incentive to artistic effort. He was always too much concerned with the things at his feet, with matter that he could dissect and investigate, to give much thought to the broad and comprehensive scheme of which these things formed part. Whatever he arrived at in the way of a record of a natural effect was reached not so much by thorough understanding of the effect as a whole, as by an amazingly acute interpretation of the influence exercised by it upon the details upon which his eyes were fixed.

No consideration of his influence and no review of his performance would be complete without an appreciative reference to his services to black and white. As a painter he has a secure place among the chief modern masters of the world; but what he did for pictorial art was paralleled, if not surpassed, by his assertion of the dignity and importance of illustration as a form of occupation for even the greatest of art workers.

It has been well said that if Millais had never devoted himself to the painting of oil pictures, but had given his life entirely to the work of book illustration, his position would still have been indisputable, and his magnificent ability would have been amply demonstrated. There is, indeed, a great deal of truth in this contention. Although the world would have been the poorer for the loss of his masterly essays in brushwork, and of his wonderful exercises in the arrangement of strong colour, it would have possessed extremely significant evidence of the reality of his artistic judgment, and of the adaptability of his inventive powers. In his black and white work he showed frequently a side of his capacity that appeared in his painting only on great occasions, a sense of dramatic exigencies, a feeling for illustrative meanings, far beyond what was suggested by the general run of his pictures. As an interpreter of the fancies of other men he was exceptionally intelligent, with a memorable grasp of the salient points of the story and a remarkable facility in summarising essentials. He was afraid of nothing in the way of a subject, and spared no labour to make his drawings completely expressive.

His love of black and white was indeed a genuine one. Illustration was not to him, as it so often is with other men, a mere expedient, resorted to because an unappreciative public refused to recognise the merit and importance of his paintings, and abandoned gladly as soon as he found he could make a sufficient income without it. On the contrary, he welcomed the opportunities with which this branch of art practice provided him, and regarded them as of the highest value. For more than twenty years he was a prolific illustrator, constantly busy with drawings that were reproduced in all kinds of books and magazines; and even in his later life occasional examples appeared to prove that his hand had not lost its cunning and that his interest in this type of work was undiminished.

How deeply he felt about this particular subject is, perhaps, best proved by his constant advocacy, within and without the Academy, of the claims of illustrative draughtsmen to official recognition. Before the Royal Commission on the Academy he strenuously urged that workers in black and white should be declared eligible for election to membership of that institution as draughtsmen purely, instead of being required to disguise themselves as picture painters before they could hope for admission; and his pleading then expressed a conviction which remained strong in him till his death. He spoke with real authority on a matter that, both by inclination and association, he was fully qualified to discuss. His experience of illustrative drawing, and his acquaintance with the history of its development, were both peculiarly intimate; and he knew exactly what were the possibilities of influence possessed by the craft.

About his technical methods there is comparatively little to be said. He was not a worker who concerned himself very deeply over devices of execution, or cared to codify his system of painting in accordance with scientific principles. He drew well, and handled his materials with the sureness and confidence that came from complete knowledge of what he wanted to do. His chief desire, as has been already stated, was to retain in pictures that had really cost him deep thought and prolonged labour an aspect of spontaneity and freshness; to be direct in statement and simple in expression. He had a well-founded belief that the finest art was that in which the meaning of the artist was to be realised with the least amount of seeking and with as little inquiry as possible about his intentions. Consequently, he strove all his life to master the intricacies of his craft, so that no hesitation on his part might make his meaning vague or indefinite.

There is hardly one of these pictures which does not by its superlative quality deserve a place among the great things that may be said to have made our art history. They show Sir John Millais not only as a splendid executant but also as a frank and sincere thinker on art questions, who did not hesitate to modify his opinions as his widening experience proved to him that a better way than the one which he was following at the moment might be found to lead him to the highest results. It is a fortunate circumstance that with one exception the whole of this group of noble works can be counted as public property. They have passed into galleries where they are always accessible, and they are within the reach of every student who wishes to profit by the great lessons they are able to teach.

CHRIST IN THE HOUSE OF HIS PARENTS

This is the earliest and in some respects the most ambitious of the Pre-Raphaelite pictures. In it all the resources of Pre-Raphaelitism are turned to good account, and the logic of the creed is asserted with unquestioning faith. A verse in Zechariah, "And one shall say unto him, 'What are these wounds in thine hands?' Then he shall answer, 'Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends,'" provided the motive, and the love of exact and searching observation which was from the first the governing principle of the artist's practice, controlled every detail of the execution.

Millais did not hesitate to put on one side all the namby-pamby prettiness and elegant affectation which governed the production of his contemporaries, and struck out for himself in a very different direction. He laid the scene of his story in the house of Joseph, and, to quote another critic, associated the characters of the sacred story "with the meanest details of a carpenter's shop, with no conceivable omission of misery, of dirt, and even of disease, all finished with the same loathsome minuteness." The child Christ stands before the carpenter's bench with the Virgin kneeling beside him preparing to bind up with a piece of linen a wound in his hand, at which Joseph leaning forward from the end of the bench is looking. St. Anne in the background is picking up a pair of pincers, and beside Joseph is John the Baptist coming towards the central group with a bowl of water in his hands. An assistant on the other side of the picture watches the incident gravely.

The keynote of the whole composition is its earnest symbolism. Every one of the lovingly laboured details explains something of the story, the tools on the wall, the dove perched on the ladder, and the sheep, typifying the faithful, and the wattled fence, an emblem of the Church, which are seen through the doorway; while in the meadow beyond is placed a well as a symbol of Truth. In its imaginative qualities, the picture is not less masterly than in its technical accuracy, and excites as much wonder by the depth of thought it reveals as by its astonishing accomplishment. It is the most original of all the artist's earlier works, marking definitely his emancipation from the influences of his student days, and his development in craftsmanship.

OPHELIA

AUTUMN LEAVES

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