A cheer for the quetzal, a sigh for the heron
By far the most entertaining show in London is the comprehensive exhibition of paintings by Millais at Tate Britain. In addition to his genius for creating an image which remains in the mind — the surest sign of a great painter — Millais had a wonderful knack of portraying interesting subjects and objects and took immense trouble to get the details right. The most riveting item in the show is ‘The Ruling Passion’, originally called ‘The Ornithologist’, showing an old bird-fancier on his deathbed, surrounded by children mesmerised by his collection of exotics; it is one of the finest bits of painting Millais contrived to pull off.
On the left sits a teenage girl — it was 1885 and the artist was 56 — with a Resplendent Quetzal in her lap. This bird has interested me ever since, nearly 50 years ago, I was shown one flying about in Costa Rica. It is of astonishing form and beauty and even the best photographs do not do it justice because they cannot convey the magic of seeing this creature actually flying about. Its basic colour is bright scarlet, covering its body, but over it — head, wings and tail — is a vivid shiny green, which on the top of its large head turns into black and gold, and some of its tail feathers are silver white. Its tail is enormously long and precarious-looking, more than twice as big as the rest of its body, and you can’t imagine how this exotic thing gets through the ordinary routine of living. It is the monarch of the Central American rainforest, very shy and difficult to get at unless you are prepared to take your life and health in your hands and penetrate the jungle. Even then the odds are you will not see one. I must have been lucky. The quetzal is the national bird of Guatemala and gave its name to the currency. It is big, over a foot long even without the tail, and you can understand why the Aztecs prized it so highly. A garland of its feathers was the mark of the gods, and killing one was a capital crime: you were made a human sacrifice by way of reparation. It is still heavily protected, not as a rule by death, though being locked up in a Central American jail, as Graham Greene used to say, comes to much the same thing. If you see a beautiful woman wearing bright green quetzal feathers she is worth investigating a bit, to see how she came by them. I love painting quetzals for the birthday cards I do for my innumerable grandchildren, great-nieces and nephews, godchildren etc. For these I have to use photographs, and there is a particularly good one in a book called Remarkable Birds, put together and written by Stephen Moss and published by HarperCollins.
The quetzal held by the girl in the Millais painting is stuffed, of course — they all are, including the Bird of Paradise the stricken ornithologist holds in his hand. The girl’s thoughts are elsewhere. Perhaps she is reflecting on the cruelty and waste, or sacrifice, of killing beautiful birds in order to stuff them and put them into glass cases. The Victorians were keen on this practice: all big country houses, and many minor ones, had some kind of natural science display including birds. But Millais was not the kind of man to make a protest, even implicit, against using birds thus, to display their beauty and teach the young. His approach to nature, like Landseer’s, was robust. All his adult life, as soon as he could afford it, he spent weeks, even months, every autumn in the Scottish Highlands, fishing, shooting and hunting.
Late in his life, when his reputation was secure, and he had built himself a palatial studio-house, he took to painting the Scottish landscape with a passion and intensity rarely equalled by an English painter since the glorious days of Turner and Constable. Since he brought to this task his wonderful attention to detail and his skill with colour and form, the results are magnificent. At the Tate show there is a whole room full of these big landscapes, which comes as a surprise to many people unfamiliar with Millais’s all-round interest in anything paintable. The sullen, grey, misty wetness of the Highlands invades and pervades the room with palpable force. One picture shows the ruined Castle Urquhart on the shores of Loch Ness during a stormy day, the wind whipping up the waves of that sinister body of water with a witchlike fury. I have seen this view, from near Drumnadrochit, many times and painted it too, and can testify to the wonderful verisimilitude of Millais’s presentation. One expects the Monster to emerge at any second, and scramble up the rocky headland to the castle, roaring to devour anyone within.
In the right-hand corner of the ornithological painting is the head of a heron peeping out of a case. What does one do about herons? They are the most beautiful, proud, stately and formidable of birds. They are also zealous and terrifying hunters of prize salmon, amazingly quick to spot an opportunity for a kill, and swift as light in diving into the river to carry out an act of depredation. Their greed is colossal and insatiable. They will eat their entire body-weight in fish every day of their lives if they get the chance. Water-bailiffs hate them, with good reason, and so do their employees the lairds, whose livelihood may depend on a few good stretches of salmon rivers, and the success with which they are protected from poachers, human and avian. I was once out with my great walking companion, the late Simon Fraser, Master of Lovat, visiting some of the pools of the Beauly River, near Eskadale. Suddenly we spotted a heron, hard at work killing and wolfing salmon on its usual industrial scale. Before I could stop him, Simon got out his gun and nailed the thief. I remonstrated, but no power of law or argument will stop the owner of a salmon river from defending his property from such a miscreant, second in unpopularity only to the dreaded Hoodie. But whereas the Hooded Crow is disgustingly ugly in life as well as death, the dreadful thing about killing a heron is that in one fatal second it is transformed from a creature of patriarchal magnificence and a miracle of design to a mere huddled bundle of bones and feathers, an insignificant nothing, fit only to be buried and forgotten. However, I never actually feel sorry for herons. Keepers are now closer to being an endangered species than they are. According to that invaluable book by Michael Waterhouse, The State of England’s Birds, its numbers are ‘substantially’ on the increase, and there are about 10,000 heron nests in Britain today. Salmon are thriving, too, to judge by the cheapness and quality available in fish shops and restaurants. No doubt most of it comes from well-protected fish farms.
Ruskin thought that ‘The Ruling Passion’ was one of Millais’s best paintings. So it is. But the artist could not sell it. The man who originally encouraged him to paint it became terrified by watching an old relative of his die slowly, just like the enfeebled ornithologist. He pulled out of the deal. No one else would fork out the huge sum Millais demanded, and he still had it in his studio when he died in 1899. Now it is owned by canny Glasgow and is one of the best-loved pictures in its entire collection.
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