Exhibitions
John Everett Millais (Southampton City Art Gallery and Southampton Institute, till 4 August) Boudin to Duly (Southampton City Art Gallery, till 4 August)
Caught off balance
John Spurting
John Everett Millais, who died a century ago, was born in Southampton in 1829. The date seems almost impossible when one looks at the drawings in the first room of the centenary exhibition at Southamp- ton City Art Gallery. Here are sketches, family portraits, a self-portrait and the fin- ished study of a classical bust done between the ages of seven and ten. An extremely complicated drawing of a pro- cession through a mediaeval town, with houses, jostling sightseers, a canopy car- ried over the Prince of Wales and at least 20 horsemen, is dated 1839. A year later Millais became the youngest ever student of the Royal Academy; and eight years after that, at the ripe age of 19, one of the founder members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
But although several of his later paint- ings — 'Ophelia', 'The Blind Girl', 'Mari- ana', 'The Boyhood of Raleigh', 'Autumn Leaves' — remain icons of the Victorian age and he made memorable portraits of many of its leading lights (Ruskin, Glad-
stone, Disraeli, Tennyson, Newman, Irv- ing), this centenary catches him, as it were, off balance. Unlike the almost forgotten Leighton or the protean and political Mor- ris, both of whom also died in 1896 and have been saluted this year with major London exhibitions, Millais has already been thoroughly assessed and assimilated; but the real reason for his metropolitan neglect (though there was a small exhibition of his drawings earlier this year at the Royal Academy) is perhaps that, whatever he had to say to his own period, he has very little to say to ours. Apart from his portraits, his mature works are not only theatrical in composition, but principally concerned with a single theatrical emotion: pathos. Most of them look artificial and even sentimental to us. Millais's precocious skill combined with the Victorian public's sweet tooth for cos- tume drama, which he evidently shared uncritically, made him adept at picking and presenting suitable subjects but drew him away from any serious exploration of sub- ject matter. His immense promise dissolved into — or never developed beyond — high- class illustration.
The City Gallery's modest exhibition of drawings and paintings and the companion exhibition of prints, photographs, book illustrations and family memorabilia at the Southampton Institute come from the col- lection inherited and added to by his great- grandson, Sir Geoffrey Millais, and do not contain any of the best-known works; but there are three large landscapes painted in Scotland which reveal a less familiar Mil- lais. The sombre 'Urquhart Castle, Loch Ness' was made soon after the death of his second son in 1879, while the autumnal 'Halcyon Weather' and the wintry 'Dew Drenched Furze' date from the 1890s, not long before his own death. All three are paintings of mood and feeling, with an almost Symbolist intensity, as if, alone in the field, he could temporarily forget his lOng-established status as a grandee artist and probe what lay beneath that predilec- tion for facile pathos: his real sense of the uncertain frontier between sadness and happiness.
The Southampton City Art Gallery is also playing host to an exhibition of some of Millais's French contemporaries from the Muscle des Beaux Arts at Le Havre. Monet's notorious 'Impression, sunrise', which gave Impressionism its name, was painted at Le Havre, though it is not in this show. Boudin was born on the.other side of the mouth of the Seine, at Honfleur, and spent most of his life in Le Havre; Pissarro was painting there during the last summer of his life (1903); Dufy was born there. Many of the paintings in this exhibition were actually made in Le Havre: beach and harbour scenes by Boudin, Marquet, Lamy, Pissarro and Dufy and, on loan from the National Gallery, Monet's gloomy view of the original Muscle des Beaux Arts itself, destroyed during the second world war. All of them are seaside or riverside scenes, so that the whole show conveys a kind of holi- day atmosphere, except for two paintings by Boudin and one by Lamy of burly wash- erwomen kneeling in lines at the water's edge, and Monet's luridly fog-bound Thames with the purple Houses of Parlia- ment looming out of it.
Pissarro's 'Outer Harbour of Le Havre, Quai de Southampton', with its glistening ice-blue light bounced between cloudy sky and choppy water, catches this romantic exhilaration best, without blinking at the workaday funnels, of the steamers or the ugly crane on the quayside or even the public urinal directly in the foreground. The truth learnt and taught by the Impres- sionists that an artist need not choose between beauty and modern life came too late for Millais and his Pre-Raphaelite brethren. It was never more obvious than in the coincidence of these two exhibi- tions, separated only by a gallery contain- ing Bume-Jones's set of huge canvases based on the myth of Perseus, desperately ambitious in conception, but imaginatively puny, suggesting nothing so much as a Wagnerian opera created by Gilbert and Sullivan.
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