Take another look at Millais
Andrew Lambirth urges those who think they don’t like this artist to go and see this show
Last chance to see this large and lavish retrospective of the most famous of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Millais (Tate Britain, until 13 January). The Tate confidently asserts that John Everett Millais (1829–96) was the ‘greatest’ of the association which initially consisted of Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and himself, with a handful of fellow-travellers. Later Burne-Jones and William Morris formed a second-generation PRB, and there were other useful associates like Ford Madox Brown, William Dyce, Arthur Hughes and John Brett. To call Millais the ‘greatest’ is to oversimplify matters. Although Rossetti wasn’t a great painter technically, his poetic vision was remarkable and arguably more powerful than anything Millais did, while Holman Hunt was a great painter of startling and sometimes awkward originality. He tends to be marginalised somewhat, not appealing quite so much as Millais to the inherent sentimentality of the British, though the magnificent two-volume catalogue raisonné of Hunt’s work recently published by Yale goes some way to set the record straight.
My discourse here is not aimed at those who already like Millais and the Pre-Raphaelites. There is no point in preaching to the converted. The Millais show scarcely needs more publicity, and indeed it was humming with dedicated (or at least interested) visitors the day I went. No, I want to persuade those who think they don’t like Millais to go along to the Tate and make up their minds all over again. That’s why easy pronouncements such as ‘Millais was the greatest painter of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’ are just not searching or provocative enough. That’s not going to unsettle an established opinion or prejudice. In fact, it’s even more of a plea than usual for critical somnolence and inattention. On your behalf, gentle reader, I try to go round exhibitions with an open mind and a questing intelligence. It’s not always easy, let me tell you. The temptation to give way to bias and rooted preconceptions is strong. But I do try to empty my mind of such impedimenta before entering a gallery. There’s nothing quite like that first unencumbered sight of good art to thrill the heart...
Enter the first room of the Millais show and you’re at once in the thick of it. Literally — there were so many people there, the only things I could get close to initially were the flat cabinets. These were filled with the most remarkable and crystalline drawings, in pen and ink or pencil, very often studies for the paintings around the walls. And this room is hung with the most striking collection of well-known paintings that it’s almost impossible to view it with anything approaching objectivity. Such Pre-Raphaelite icons as ‘Ophelia’, ‘Christ in the House of His Parents’ (the painting Dickens famously dismissed as both blasphemous and ugly) and ‘Isabella’ are all here.
To return for a moment to the drawings, which are a relatively direct point of entry for the show, there is a lucidity to Millais’s line whatever the scholars may say about them being ‘self-consciously naive’ in their ‘spatial ambiguity and schematic treatment of form’. The drawings take you to the heart of the subject with an intensity we don’t usually associate with such polished preliminary studies. For instance, look at the study for ‘Christ in the House of his Parents’. Various aspects of this drawing may have been redesigned in the final painting, but the essence of the image is here and in a purer form. It’s not just a compositional study, it’s a fully functioning picture. Note the similar clarity, which mounts to an hallucinatory focus, in the studies for ‘The Woodman’s Daughter’ and ‘Mariana’.
In this first room there are less intense delights, such as the small portrait of Wilkie Collins, but the eye is soon to be jolted again as it turns to the ravishing electric blue of Mariana’s dress. It is utterly unworldly. ‘The Bridesmaid’ nearby offers a different but equally mesmeric blue in this small experimental painting, showing that Millais could handle colour in just as interesting and searingly evocative ways as he dealt out line.
Going into the second room, the visitor is faced by another famous Millais image, ‘The Blind Girl’. Is it just a taste for the drama of sentiment (here superbly enhanced by atmospheric conditions: the heightened colours of nature against a stormy sky with a double rainbow piercing glowering clouds) which ensures the popularity of this painting? It was the first of Millais’s subjects to be termed ‘pathetic’, not in any derogatory sense but in recognition of its attempt to capture the true pathos of the girl’s situation. Even Walter Sickert, not easily beguiled, was a fervent admirer and called it ‘a miracle by which he will survive’, due to Millais’s ‘keen sense of the touching mystery of childish facial expression’. For Sickert, that was Millais’s ‘proper scale’. He thought his greatest talent was for faces, and that there was ‘a certain woodenness in the figures’. There is certainly a kind of stately and majestic woodenness to the figure of Ruskin in the celebrated portrait of him standing above a Scottish waterfall, but this seems to suit the subject. More interesting is the small informal cabinet painting entitled ‘Waiting’ (1854), oddly relaxed in treatment for a tense subject — a girl sitting huddled in a shawl on a stile — and almost impressionistic in handling. Gone is the meticulous each-blade-of-grass inclusivity of earlier work. This is something altogether broader, and suggestive rather than overtly descriptive.
The drawings are consistently good in this show, and repay closer study in Room 2 than many of the paintings which are romantic and historical in subject, and oppressively stagey in their narratives, in spite of Millais’s technical virtuosity. (Look, for instance, at another well-known image, the fireman glowing redly, caught in the act of ‘The Rescue’.) The drawings here tend to be in sepia ink, and have a different, more flickering quality to them. ‘Accepted’ and ‘Goodbye, I Shall See You Tomorrow’ are particularly fine examples. From here, we progress into the thickets of Aestheticism (Room 3) and The Grand Tradition (Room 4), twin virtues that can turn so easily to vices if not guarded against. ‘Autumn Leaves’, which reminds me of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s marvellous poem ‘Spring and Fall’, features with ‘Leisure Hours’ in the Aesthetic emphasis on pattern, while the Grand Tradition has less obsession about it, and too much sentiment.
The Fancy Pictures in Room 5 include such yucky classics as ‘Bubbles’ and ‘Cherry Ripe’, while a penultimate section devoted to portraits ought to be more powerful (if we accept Sickert’s judgment) than it actually is. However, there are such marvels here as ‘A Jersey Lily’, Millais’s famous portrait of Lillie Langtry, deliciously understated despite the liquid look, and ‘Louise Jopling’, respendent in a lusciously patterned Parisian gown. The last room contains a dozen late landscapes and ends the show on a very high note indeed. All deserve long and lingering attention, but particularly the unusual ‘DewDrenched Furze’ (1889–90), a marvel of texture with its scratched look so very appropriate to a depiction of gorse. For the sake of these landscapes, for his unusual colour and for his compelling draughtsmanship, Millais deserves another look, even from those most obstinately inimical to him.
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