A. L. Baldry

“ Although Millais had completed his sixty-seventh year he was still in art a young man. His vigour had not waned, and there was no perceptible diminution of his artistic vitality even in those last works which he painted under the shadow of nearly impending death. To a man of his splendid physique and buoyant temperament age would have come slowly, and the inevitable degeneration of his powers would have not begun for many more years. ”

“ The dramatic feeling of the picture is as convincing as its pathos; the painter has grasped completely the possibilities of his subject, and he tells his story with just the touch of mystery needed to give it due significance. The management of the light and shade, and of the contrast between the warm lamplight and the greyness of the early morning, is full of both power and subtlety. ”

“ Few men have done more to uphold the repute of the Academy, few have by the brilliancy of their powers and their charm of personality done it more credit. That Leighton was the ideal President can be readily admitted, but Millais, as his successor, would have carried on a great tradition with dignity and sympathy and with no diminution of his predecessor’s generous tolerance and earnest sense of artistic responsibility. ”

“ Instead, he went out into the world and acquired his impressions of humanity in all directions and at first hand, finding much pleasure in association with his fellow-men. To his own human nature he gave free rein; he was a keen sportsman, a lover of children—of whose ways he had, as he proved in scores of pictures, a perfect understanding—and a man who was always happy in congenial society, and always welcome. ”

“ To the man who has loved and lost, the vision of his lady appearing to him as he lies awake at dawn seems so real and living that he begs her to speak to him, and stretches out his arms to clasp what is after all only a creation of his imagination. ”

“ There was at this time a change coming over his art, a change which suggested that the stricter limits of Pre-Raphaelitism were a little too narrow for him now that his youthful enthusiasms were being replaced by the more tolerant ideas of mental maturity. But he was in no haste to abandon his earlier principles; he sought rather to find how they might be widened to cover artistic motives which scarcely came within the scope of the creed to which the Brotherhood had originally been pledged. ”

“ For this purer art they turned to the works of the Italian Primitives, whose childlike unconventionality and unhesitating naturalism touched a responsive chord in the natures of these youths who still retained some of the simple faith in reality which is one of the charms of childhood. ”

“ This is one of the pictures which Millais always reckoned among the greatest of all his successes, and that it has many notable qualities which justify his preference can certainly not be denied. It is wonderful in its earnest and thoughtful realism, and it explains its motive with a completeness that is most convincing. The expression on the face of the woman who brings the order which frees her husband from prison is singularly happy in its combination of tenderness for the wounded Highlander, and triumph over the hesitating gaoler ”

“ This landscape, “Chill October,” was at the Academy with his “Yes or No?” “Victory, O Lord,” “A Somnambulist,” and the [Pg 57] “Portrait of George Grote,” and it was welcomed by a host of admirers as a new revelation of his versatility. It has certainly qualities which justify the estimation in which it was and is still held; and though it lacks that imaginative insight into poetic subtleties which accounts for so much in the work of a master like Turner, it must always claim the respect of art lovers as a large, dignified, and sincere study of nature in one of her sadder moods. ”

“ Yet we may be grateful to fate for allowing him to develop the promise of his youth in the splendour of his maturer years; it is so often the lot of the precocious genius to die young with his mission but half fulfilled. If death had come to Millais as it did to Bonington or Fred Walker, our loss would have been sad indeed.
In discussing Millais as an artist the part which his personality played in making him what he was must by no means be overlooked. ”

“ But fortunately the courage of the Brotherhood was proof against everything which the opposition could do, and neither abuse nor threats had any effect. Yet Millais at the time suffered for his principles; paintings which had been commissioned were thrown upon his hands, and his pictures almost ceased to be saleable. He had every proof that his Pre-Raphaelitism was commercially a mistake and that, if he persisted, the absolute marring of his career as a popular painter, was more than likely, yet, so stubborn was his conviction that he made no change in either his principles or his practice. ”

“ The rare brilliancy of his student career had gained him the fullest approval of his fellow-workers in art, and he was beginning his career as a producer with every prospect of becoming immediately one of the most popular artists of his time. Everything was in his favour; he had undeniable ability, good health, and an attractive personality, and he had proved in many ways that, young as he was, he [Pg 21] could handle large undertakings with sound judgment and complete confidence. ”

“ That this brief taste of unpopularity did him good rather than harm can well be imagined, for without making him bitter it tested with some severity his tenacity and his power to fight vigorously for what he believed to be right—and such a test has always its value as a means of developing the finer qualities of a strong man, or as a warning to the weak one of the need for self-examination. ”

“ His ancestors were men of action and inclined rather to be fighters than students of the arts. They were Normans who had settled in Jersey, and had for several hundred years been counted among the more important landholders in that island, where at different times they held several estates. From these ancestors Millais derived his energetic temperament and that militant activity which enabled him in his career as an artist to triumph signally over established prejudices—the qualities which undoubtedly helped him to make his power felt even [Pg 17] by the people who were most opposed to him. ”

“ As a record of some half century of brilliant activity, and of practically unbroken success, the life-story of John Everett Millais is in many respects unlike those which can be told about the majority of artists who have played great parts in the modern art world. ”

“ The three youths had come under the influence of Ford Madox Brown, who with splendid sincerity was labouring to realise an ideal based not upon fashion, but upon an earnest desire for truthful expression, and by his example they were induced to study a purer type of art than any they could see about them. ”

“ The head of the old man, who is the central figure in the picture, is entirely magnificent, and there is much besides in this canvas which would have been beyond the reach of any one but an artist of almost abnormal power. ”

“ It is generally recognised that the effective representation of the nude figure imposes the severest test not only upon an artist’s powers of drawing and painting but upon his sense of æsthetic propriety as well. The “Knight Errant” proves beyond dispute that Millais was able to pass this test triumphantly, for the picture is a magnificent technical achievement and is absolutely discreet in treatment. The subject, a lady rescued from robbers by a wandering knight, is one which occurs frequently in mediæval romance. ”

“ Indeed, from the standpoint of the decorative figure painter—of men like Leighton, or Albert Moore, for instance—the woman that Millais has represented is too frankly unidealised, too modern in type, and too realistically feminine.
But in this disregard of convention there is a kind of summing up of his beliefs as an artist. Though he had changed the outward aspect of his art he was still in spirit a Pre-Raphaelite, and a Pre-Raphaelite he remained to the end of his days. ”

“ Millais was, of course, far too great a master to have failed in any branch of artistic practice to which he seriously devoted himself, but the very capacities which made him so successful as a painter of the human subject prevented him from looking at open-air nature with the necessary degree of abstraction. ”

“ Conscientiousness as a craftsman was always one of his virtues, and the knowledge that he had a host of admirers ready to accept almost anything he would give them had certainly not the effect of inducing him to lower his standard. ”

“ As an example of the quiet and unforced sentiment which characterises so many of the pictures which Millais painted, this delightful composition deserves particular consideration. It has a certain severity of design and solemnity of manner, but in its suggestion of the sadness of autumn there is no trace of morbid sentimentality and no kind of theatrical effect. ”

“ It proves plainly enough that his avoidance of subjects of this class was not due to any inability on his part to succeed as a flesh painter, for this figure is beautiful both in colour and handling; it is more probable that the classic formality and con [Pg 54] ventionality which public opinion in this country requires in the representation of the nude did not appeal to a man with his love of actuality and sincere regard for nature’s facts. ”

“ Even before Leighton’s death he had been suffering from a throat trouble which not long after was pronounced to be cancer; and in the months that followed immediately on his election the disease made rapid progress. Not long after the opening of the 1896 Academy Exhibition his condition became so serious that an immediately fatal result was expected ”