ART.
SIR JOHN MILLAIS.
NOTICE.]*
BEFORE we criticise any of the works in this collection in detail, which we hope to do with some minuteness at a later period, let us first express our hearty thanks to Sir Coutts Lindsay and the directors of the Grosvenor Gallery for having brought this collection together. The Mahommedans say, "Praise Allah !" when they see a beautiful woman,—and many of the pictures here are F o splendid that one might well echo their sentiment, with a difference, and say, "Praise God for a great artist !" After all, that must invariably be the first thing that one thinks of Millais's work, no matter how much we may regret some of its limitations, or how strongly we may feel that in some ways the artist has
" Lost the heritage in his gift."
Of this we have often spoken in these columns,—spoken, per- haps, with too much insistence and too much harshness. And yet, an artist has only himself to blame if, having accustomed those who really know and appreciate his work to expect splendid things at his hands, he finds himself censured when he neglects his old traditions, and prostitutes his ancient faith ; and when having, while yet a youthful student, headed and justified a glorious revolt against all that was conventional, artificial, and enervating in painting, he becomes, at the height of his reputation and in the plenitude of his power, the preacher who practises what he scorned, the apostle of the faith which of old he strove to destroy. Think of what the man might have clone at fifty, who had painted "The Huguenot " before he was twenty-three, in a back room at Gower Street ! And if one wants to see what he did paint at fifty or thereabouts, and to appreciate truly the influence exerted over him by the most widespread popularity, let us look at the portrait of Henry Irving, which hangs above the last-mentioned picture, with its dull uniformities of grey and brown, its absence of enthusiasm, its matter-of-fact conventionalism.
At nine years old, Millais won the silver medal from the Society of Arts for an antique drawing ; at eighteen, he exhibited a large oil picture in the Royal Academy ; at twenty, he, with Rossetti and Holman Hunt and one or two others, founded the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood ; at twenty-three, he painted " The Huguenot ;" at twenty-six, he was made an Associate of the Royal Academy ; at thirty-five, he received full Academic honours, in 1863; and in that year he painted his last pre- Raphaelite picture, which, with the exception of one or two single- figure works to be mentioned presently, was also his last great subject-picture. Between 1863 and 1876 he painted a magnifi- cent series of portraits and all his finest landscapes. From that date to the present his work has been entirely in portraiture or in single-figure, semi-sentimental subjects, produced for, or at all events devoted to, the purpose of being reproduced in a popular form in the Christmas numbers of the illustrated papers, or in engravings for the fine-art publishers. Let us see what this means. An unprecedentedly successful youth, an early manhood of glorious achievement and still more glorious promise, fall of pictorial realisation of the glories of our literature and the traditions of our faith ; and then suddenly an abandonment of all that had previously been the backbone of his art, Loth in principle and subject,—a narrowing down of the world to the limits of a Belgravian drawing-room, a substitution of pretty, ladylike nonentities for Ophelia and Saint Agnes, and of the children of — Jones, Esq., for the boyhood of the Saviour. Every now and again during this period —from 1863 to the present time—the artist seems to have had some faint wish to go back to his earlier subjects ; and the three pictures painted in 1868, 1870, and 1874 respectively- " Rosalind and Celia," "The Boyhood of Raleigh," and "The North-West Passage "—mark his attempts to render the subjects which would have aroused his enthusiasm in youth with something of the old completeness. It is strange, with all the beauties and technical triumphs which these pictures
• Groivenor Gallery, 1885.
contain, how utterly the old power has disappeared. There is, if we may be allowed such an expression, the trail of Belgravia over them all ; there seems to be a furtive look round the corner to see if the chromo-lithographer is not waiting for the picture. The gestures of the figures are stock and conventional; the sentiment of the work commonplace ; the rendering only partial in its truth and completeness. Though better in degree, they are not different in kind to all the other pictures which weary us at the Academy ; the painter has not got hold of the heart of his subject as he used to do in the days when Holman Hunt had him by one arm and Rossetti by the other. Of course, the silly public which hates to think save in its accustomed lines, and hates to have more truth shown it than its dull eyes can easily perceive, clamoured round these latter works with a cackle of approbation only comparable in its loudness to the chorus of disapproval with which they had hailed "The Carpenter's Shop" and the "Lorenzo and Isabella." They had got their great artist now, bevelled down to their own inane level, and were not they proud of him ? So, at least, we may fancy they thought.
It is hard to blame the painter, unjust to hold him wholly responsible for the change in his art. He had been subjected in youth, when the blood is hot, and insults and injustice have a power to sting which they do not possess in later years, to every kind of ridicule and contumely. Though never unsuccessful in the sense of not being hung or of being unable to sell some of his work, he had yet seen several of his best pictures, into which he had, so to speak, put his very heart's blood, unpurchased for years, owing to the harsh ignorance of his critics. And after all, we can imagine him saying to himself, "Well, if they won't let me paint as I like,—if they will have their pretty young women and bluff old gentlemen, and nice little sentimental, not too exciting, stories, so much the better for me,—they won't give me half the amount of trouble, and they will be mere child's-play after what I have been doing." Of course the defence, if a defence be necessary, does not go very far ; an artist, we may think, in proportion to his greatness, should have not only the courage, but the endurance of his convictions ; his artistic birthright should not be bartered away for any number of messes of pottage. Still, artists are men, like the rest of us ; and it may be doubted in this case whether Mr. Millais (as he was then) was not really more in accord, as far as his natural character went, with the style and subjects of his latter than of his earlier painting. The truth we believe to have been this,—that he is a man whose intellectual calibre has always been in subordination to his artistic faculty. It probably was, though it sounds absurd to say it, an accident that he painted "The Huguenot," and all the earlier pre-Raphaelite pictures. The fact is that Ruskin, and still more Rossetti, had got hold of him and were pouring medimval Italian art into one ear and fidelity to Nature into the other. He was a bit of plastic, artistic clay, ductile with the enthusiasm of youth, and powerful with that magni- ficent artistic faculty (backed by physical health) which has never yet wholly failed him ; and he produced these lovely bits of colour, and intensely truthful renderings of imaginative subjects, almost with the simplicity of a child who did what he was toll He is one of the rare artists who have made other people feel in his pictures what he has never felt himself. According to all theories of art in the world worth listening to, this is impossible ; but he did it. It is impossible to look at these early works without seeing that they are absolutely transfused, first with the spirit of Rossetti, second with the spirit of Ruskin; and that as that influence fades, so also fades the poetry of the work. There is not only a difference in execution between such pictures as "Lorenzo and Isabella" and "The Boyhood of Raleigh ;" the works are intellectually a hundred miles apart. The comparison would hold equally good of any of the pictures of similar periods. Artistically, the painter can do anything,—he always could ; anything, that is, that is to be done with hands. And in the old days he had to help him, not only his hands and his plenitude of time, but Ruskin's brains and B,ossetti's spirit. The extraordinary part of the matter is, not that he was influenced by them, but that he so entirely absorbed their theories. The portrait of Ruskin, standing on the rocks by a waterfall, might have been done by Ruskin himself; the "Lorenzo and Isabella "is far more of a Rossetti in spirit than it is of a Millais. In other pictures we see bits of one and bits of the other, mixed up with bits of Holman Hunt. It was natural enough that when this enthusiasm of Millais for Ruskin and pre-Raphaeliam was attacked so vehemently from without, the traitor within the citadel, the real artistic man, who had given back, even aa a
mirror might, reflections of the most vital influences by which he had been surrounded,—hung out first a flag of truce, and then surrendered. We see even in "The Huguenot" itself the temporising and negotiating spirit pleading, as it were, to be allowed his fidelity to nature, if only he combined it with some emotional attractiveness ; we see it still more in "The Proscribed Royalist," which followed the next year, and most of all in "The Black Brunswicker," six years later, which is, after all, but a conventionalised copy of "The Huguenot." In the period between these pictures we perceive how the artist shifted backwards and forwards ; now trying to harden himself in such work as "The Vale of Rest," now relapsing into the matter-of-fact prettiness of The White Cockade," till, with the picture two years later of "St. Agnes' Eve," he may be said practically to abandon his pre-Raphaelite principles, though, of course, they recur again here and there.
In fact, about this date-1860 to 1863—the artist was begin- ning to possess his own soul, and to understand what the public liked; and had determined to give them that and nothing else. Sturdy common-sense is, no doubt, an invaluable quality ; and, from a worldly point of view, no admiration can be too great for the way in which Mr. Millais set himself to eradicate from his future work all traces of the fantaisie which he had been so blamed for showing ; but this change he could never have made, or at least could never have made so successfully, had it really been a change in his own feel- ings and principles. The truth is that his artistic faculty and enthusiasm were always so great that they sufficed the man as a motive-power. He did not care what he painted—did not care in his heart on what principles he did it—but did care intensely for making his handicraft as perfect as possible. A great artist he meant to be, probably felt he was, from the very first ; but he meant also to be a successful man, and there was at the bottom of his heart that curious British Philistinism which we can trace in so many of our great artists. It would be in most cases some- what beyond our province to speak so plainly upon the character of this painter's work, involving, as it does, some account of— or, rather, some guess at—the motives which determined it. But if a great artist chooses to exhibit during his lifetime a representative collection of his pictures, and submit it to the public for purposes, we suppose, of popular estimation and approval, he challenges, as it appears to us, perfectly outspoken criticism. The most interesting thing in Sir John Millais's present art, to us at least, is its contrast to his earlier painting. How and why the one was developed from the other, is a problem full of significance to any art student,—the problem to which we have been trying to give some hypothetical solution.
Leaving for a moment the consideration of the earlier paintings, the characteristics of the pictures between 1863 and 1877 are threefold. First, their technical mastery, increasing impatiently almost with each succeeding year; second, the perfect sympa- thetic balance which the artist seems to hold between all varieties of his subject-matter; and third, the unaffectedness and health, the purely English quality, of the pictures. During this period, the intellectual and the ideal quality of the work has almost entirely faded. The motive of painting—or, at all events, paint- ing partially for purposes of reproduction—has hardly come in, and between these two extremes there lies this pleasant tract of artistic country, with portrait-subjects, such as the lovely picture of "New-laid Eggs," perhaps the sweetest rendering of English girlhood that the world has ever seen ; the great landscapes of "Chill October" and " Flow- ing to the Sea "—a picture, by the way, which has never been properly appreciated ; the three semi-historical and poetical compositions, " Rosalind and Celia" (1868), "The Boy- hood of Raleigh" (1870), and " The North-West Passage " (1874), of which we have already spoken, though in comparing them with the earlier work we scarcely did justice to their many fine artistic qualities; and last, but not least, a small subject- picture, in which Mr. Millais hit more perfectly his emotional intention than in any work which he had done since his pre- Raphaelite days, or in any picture which he has painted in later years. This is the single figure of "The Gambler's Wife." The prevailing characteristic of all these is the artistic one. The work seems to have been done by a good-humoured, indolent giant, in brief spasms of activity ; there is a curious absence throughout of any appearance of effort. The handling becomes broader and broader, details are slightly more generalised in each successive year, and perhaps the indolence becomes more habitual, and the spasms of energy more brief in their duration. But this period may be said to culminate in the portrait of Miss Eveleea Tennant, now Mrs. F. W. H. Myers, the celebrated picture which used to be known as the "Blue Beads," from the strings of them which Miss Tennant is wearing as a necklace over her red dress. If any picture could defend, or could excuse, Mr. Millais's changing his pre-Raphaelite method, it would, at first sight, seem to be this ; but, after all, one sees on looking at it more closely that all the fine qualities in it are its pre-Baphaelite qualities,—its blaze of colour, like a sudden blare of trumpets, its daring unconventionality of contrast, not only in its red and blue and buff and black, but in the pose of its sitter, and the black hat cocked defiantly over one eye. It is a wonderful slap- dash picture, a great achievement of masterly brush-work and freshness of impression ; but, after all, it could only have been done by one who had spent long years in unconventional, patient working from Nature ; and it may be doubted whether its ease, and breadth, and almost vociferation of artistic lan- guage, are not the very qualities in the composition which are least admirable, though they are the qualities which strike us first. Of the period succeeding this, the period, that is, which extends from 1877 to the present day, we must speak in our next notice ; nor will we say anything further in this present article than that this exhibition is without exception the most interesting collection of works which has been made, since those by Mr. Watts were exhibited in the same gallery.
Previous page
