Mary E. Coleridge

“ Steadily, through evil report and good report, the painter went his way. He did not hold—as Millais came to hold in after years—that it was the business of the artist to find out what most people wanted, and to paint that. He did not hold—as Rossetti held—that it was the business of the artist to impose his will on a select band of followers, trained by himself to believe that the age of Dante was the Golden Age, and that colour should be based on the principles of illumination. He held that an artist was accountable to God. ”

“ A man’s work must be the reflex of a living image in his own mind, and not the icy double of the facts themselves. It will be seen that we were never realists. I think art would have ceased to have the slightest interest for any of us had the object been only to make a representation, elaborate or unelaborate, of a fact in nature. ”

“ To the Bible, Holman Hunt gave his manhood—to Shakespeare, his youth! No one who desires to add to the store of England’s thought but must, at one time or another, plunge deep into the mind of her greatest thinker. It is a sign of the unthinking nature of English art that, before this time, there were no illustrations of Shakespeare worth the name. It is characteristic of the pre-eminently thoughtful nature of this artist that he should have chosen two subjects that are often misunderstood, from two plays that are hardly ever acted—the subject of Forgiveness from the “Two Gentlemen of Verona;” ”

“ The travel is in the dead of the night, the way unseen and unknown; but partly stooping from the starlight, and partly floating on the desert mirage, move with the Holy Family the glorified souls of the Innocents. Clear in celestial light, and gathered into child garlands of gladness, they look to the Child in whom they live, and yet for whom they die. ”

“ The portrait was such a good likeness that [20] the employer laughed aloud when he saw it; the fame of the thing spread fast. One night his father told him of this remarkable picture, adding that he certainly ought to see it; but no sooner had he discovered the artist than he threatened to take him away altogether if stricter discipline were not observed. Hunt was now sixteen; he had borne with the city for four years; if he waited until he came of age it would be too late to think of art as a profession. ”

“ As on so many other occasions throughout his life, he met with violent opposition. He would lose all that he had gained at such cost and have to begin over again on his return; he would find nothing but overgrown weeds, no beauty that was not tenfold more beautiful in England; he would get Syrian fever and be an invalid for the rest of his days; he would die like Wilkie. Rossetti said that local colour interfered with the poetry of design. Ruskin said that he was giving up the real purpose of his life, which was to train [48] a new school of art. What Millais said does not appear. ”

“ Determined to serve his generation, not as a playfellow, not as a tyrant, but as a master, he followed singly and faithfully that conviction which had led him from childhood to think of the Bible as the great factor in human existence. ”

“ Art “presents the form of a nation’s spirit, exactly as the sounding atoms on a vibrating plane make a constant and distinct pattern to the sound of a given note.” Likewise, “All art from the beginning served for the higher development of men’s minds. It has ever been valued as good to sustain strength for noble resolves.” ”

“ What did it matter whether the sun went round the earth or the earth went round the sun? What did anything scientific matter in comparison with Dante, with the poetry of Browning, which he would recite, over the fire, by twenty pages at a time, with Tennyson and Henry Taylor [37] and Coventry Patmore? [6] When Mr. James, the city man, the owner of the original colour-box, reduced Hunt to despair by his damning criticism of the new picture “Rienzi,” “But the man’s a born fool!” exclaimed Rossetti, with screams of laughter. ”

“ He took his life into his own hands, and declared that he meant to become a student at the Royal Academy, that he must be allowed to draw at the British Museum that he might qualify himself to pass the entrance examination.
He just contrived to make both ends meet by copy and portrait work three days out of the six. He learnt more from fellow-students than from masters. The first real instruction came from a pupil of Wilkie’s, who told him, as he sat copying “The Blind Fiddler,” that Wilkie painted without dead colour underneath, and finished each bit in turn like a fresco-painter. ”

“ Independently of the conviction that such a system would put out of operation the faculty making man “like a God,” it was apparent that a mere imitator gradually comes to see nature claylike and finite, as it seems when illness brings a cloud before the eyes.” ”

“ The music of the still small voice was the summons to the sluggard to awaken and become a zealous labourer under the Divine Master; the bat flitting about only in darkness was a natural type of ignorance ”

“ Now, as we are too busy in the day to see one another, it’s more jolly that we should do so after work, so just you be a dear old papa, and now prove to Hunt what a splendid musician you are. Hunt used to practise the violin once, but his family didn’t like it, and he could not be annoying them in music and painting, too, so he gave up his fiddling ”

“ The two boys worked hard. They sat up all night long in Millais’ studio; they kept themselves awake with coffee; they encouraged one another with talk; when Millais was tired to death of his own picture he worked on Hunt’s, and Hunt on his. “Cymon and Iphigenia” and “The Eve of St. Agnes” were sent in to the Academy at eleven o’clock on the last night possible for sending in at all, and next day, in the exuberance of their joyful relief, they accompanied the Chartist procession to Kensington Common—Millais keen to see more of the fray than his companion thought prudent. ”

“ Please click here for a modern image of the painting.
[60]
Many technical questions beset a true revival which are of deeper interest to the actors in it than to the public at large. Such was the question of the introduction of oil as a [61] medium in the old days; such was the question of the proper way to render brightness in our air. “You vagabond!” said Millais—as he watched Hunt painting in transparent colour, with light sable brushes, over a ground of half-moist white, the landscape of “The Hireling Shepherd”—“that’s just the way I paint flowers!” ”

“ The shepherd’s crook lies idle on the ground. He has found a death’s-head moth; he is too busy showing it to his companion to have any use for that. She is flattered and pleased that he should attend to her rather than to the sheep. [68]
When this picture was painted, the Oxford Movement was in the air; the shepherd and the shepherdess were alike busy with the death’s-head moth.
Turning to modern minds, the poet whose word weighed most with England at the time was undoubtedly Tennyson. ”

“ Need it be said that there had to be seven Brothers, and that the Brotherhood was to be kept a secret? Rossetti’s brother William, who had never learnt how to draw; a nominal pupil of Hunt’s, F. G. Stephens, who had never learnt how to paint; Woolner, who was a sculptor, and James Collinson, were quickly enlisted. “Collinson,” said Rossetti, “is a born stunner.”
“Where’s your flock?” shouted out Millais. “I expected to see them behind you. Tell me all about it.”
They held their first meeting in his studio, over a set of engravings of the frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa. ”

“ It was enlarged from a small design in a volume of Tennyson illustrated by Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti; and by several other artists, not of their persuasion. This particular illustration did not find favour with the poet, he objected to the lady’s hair, to her manner of wearing it. The dream has been changed into a profound allegory. The lady is—if we mistake not—the artist who, through neglect of the divine gift of reflective imagination, has failed in the high purpose of art. ”

“ But I’ll show you another queer cove if you’re coming round the corner. You see him well from the ’bus. He’s a cove, in the first place, as has a something standing all night at one winder, while he sits down at the other, or stands, and seemingly is a-drawing of it. He doesn’t go to bed like other Christians, but stays long after the last ’bus has come in ”

“ Upon the stage we have seen an actress, in despair at the difficulty of the thing, turn her back to the audience and lean against a tree while the discussion was going on; but in the picture Sylvia kneels, her hand left trustingly in that of Valentine, and we have no sooner looked at it than we believe and understand. ”

“ He was perpetually encircled by a crowd of noisy followers, and he had a most inconvenient way of showing them everything in the studio, and [32] asking them all to supper when the cupboard was bare—a very different friend from the un-Bohemian Millais, who in those days would not even smoke a pipe.
“I have always been told by artists that a pipe is of incalculable comfort to the nerves, that when harassed by the difficulties of a problem it solaces them.”
“That is the very reason, it seems to me, for not smoking. A man ought to get relief only by solving his problem,” said Millais. ”

“ The onslaughts of the press were well [43] sustained. “Valentine and Sylvia” (the subject taken from Shakespeare’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona”) had suffered, in part, from Hunt’s distress of mind and the want of means occasioned by the bad conduct of a man whom he trusted; even after Ruskin’s letter no one ventured to buy. Nobody came to him for a portrait now. His father’s acquaintance in the city offered to bet £10 that any picture of his would be sent back within a week. Anonymous insults poured in upon him. A publisher, who had asked for illustrations of Longfellow, declined to publish them. ”

“ I will never believe that you are a citizen—never! I know you are an English bedawee, and you were born in a tent.” In spite of all this filial and fraternal affection, Soleiman was not much good when danger threatened. “There are robbers,” he declared one day; “they are [53] coming this way—one, two, three, on horseback, and two—wait, three—yes, four on foot. You must put down your umbrella, shut up your picture, cover it with stones. They will not be here for an hour. We will go up in the mountains.” “No,” said Hunt, he should stay where he was, it was a good work that he had in hand ”

“ After many negotiations, for the country was in a troubled state and he risked his life by going, he encamped there, with a little band of followers to protect him, and a goat. Soleiman, one of the Arabs, desired—though only seven years younger than himself—to be his son. By what name should he call him? Hunt? ”