| HE PAINTED Gladstone, Disraeli, Scottish landscapes, pretty girls, and Bible scenes: he met Van Gogh in the street, chatted with Dickens, and Queen Victoria had regular private viewings of his work. He was also the first major artist to sell his work for advertising purposes. The Millais exhibition finally closed two weeks ago at London’s Tate gallery.
Sir John Everett Millais (1829-96), rich and lauded in the 19th century as “the greatest of British artists”, rather dropped off the artistic radar in the 20th century. He had no modernist credentials.
Dali may have been a fan of his Ophelia, but he was just too English, too bourgeois, to be a hero of the New Art. Instead of cutting off his ear, he went shooting and fishing in the Highlands; for Picasso et al. he lacked even a basic grasp of psychic fracture and social alienation.
He could, however, paint. As an excited Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo: “Once, I met the painter Millais in the street in London, just after I had been lucky enough to see several of his paintings.”
It was Millais’s landscapes that particularly gripped Van Gogh. Here was a man unafraid of big distance, unframed by compositional elements. No longer the viewer, you became as one with the scene. Could this really be the same man who painted the curly-haired boy blowing bubbles in the Pears Soap advertisement?
Millais did not completely avoid scandal. While painting her portrait, he fell in love with the wife of his friend John Ruskin. Effie then divorced Ruskin on the grounds of an unconsummated marriage, with “incurable impotency” given as explanation. Millais and Effie duly wed, and the painter showed no signs of impotency: they had eight children.
His religious painting was controversial. Dickens was most upset by the depiction of Mary in The Carpenter’s Shop — “so horrible in her ugliness”, as he wrote. Others were offended by the anatomical accuracy in the picture. Such accuracy was fine for surgeons, but not something to be encouraged in art — particularly not religious art. Saints did not have thin arms.
The Protestants, meanwhile, were furious at the possible High Church interpretation attached to the piece. No wonder Millais ended up painting Scottish landscapes, where you just had cold or midges to contend with.
The Pears Soap story rumbled on. By colluding with commerce, was he selling his soul, or democratising art? But his work transcended such spats, and he was buried in Artists’ Corner in St Paul’s Cathedral’s. Holman Hunt was one of his pallbearers.
We close with his reflections on the odour of the burning autumnal leaves: “To me, nothing brings back sweeter memories of days that are gone; it is the incense offered by despairing summer to the sky, and it brings one a happy conviction that Time puts a peaceful seal on all that is gone.” |
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