The Pre-Raphaelites at Tate Britain Part 3: Sir John Everett Millais

Sir John Millais: Ophelia

As has been recognised since the they first started exhibiting, the star of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the artist whose presence in the group was the main reason for its eventual success was John Millais. He was a prodigiously talented child, the youngest pupil ever at the Royal  Academy schools aged 10 and tipped for stardom almost from his earliest years. His years as a Pre-Raphaelite can be seen as a period of youthful rebellion against the institution which nutured him and to which he later returned as a prodigal son, to become, briefly at the end of his life, its president.

  Modern critics, who pretend to regard artists as inherently rebellious, even, ironically, arch establishment figures such as Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst, consider Millais' Pre-Raphaelite years as the highlight of his career before a return to academic banality. I think this view is harsh and overlooks both the excellence of Millais' later work and his consistent awareness of, and experimentation with, the latest trends and ideas in the art world. But having said that I think it is also true to say that over the period 1849-1860 Millais produced a huge number of works of the highest quality with a consistency which he never quite recaptured at any other stage of his career. In so doing Millais produced most of the most familiar Pre-Raphaelite masterpieces and is always the star of any group show.


Sir John Millais: Isabella

His first properly Pre-Raphaelite work, the first to be exhibited with the then mysterious initials PRB appearing in the picture was "Isabella" of 1849.  It is an extraordinary work in many ways and mostly because of its radical departure from accepted academic rules of composition. It has the curious flatness common to the groups' early work borrowed from early Italian work achieved partly by the rejection of academic rules of hierarchical lighting. Also immediately apparent is the concern with individuality, every character reveals an intense study of physiognomy and character. Above all we are struck by the Pre-Raphaelite concern for detail and finish, and all this the work of an artist not yet out of his teens!
Over the next few years Millais turned out masterpiece after masterpiece with an extraordinary facility. His "Ophelia" of 1852 has always, and deservedly, been one of the public's favourites in the Tate Gallery, a wonderful work displaying not just an extraordinary level of technical skill but also a great talent for selecting a psycological moment of great weight and import. This is an image which once seen is not easily forgotten, it has great beauty and pathos but also just that right amount of strangeness which makes it stick in the mind, My favourite probably, although it is difficult to choose, is "Mariana" of 1851. Like so many of Millais' works it is hard to see anything wrong with it. The drawing is faultless, the colour superb and the pathos and intensity of feeling in the moment selected is profound. In addition this is a small picture painted on a panel and has an almost enamel like quality of finish which enhances the jewel like quality of colour.

Sir John Millais: Mariana

In the mid 1850's Millais' technique started to get a bit broader and more painterly, a trend which was to continue through his career and end with an interest in painters such as Velasquez, surely one of the least "Pre-Raphaelite" painters of them all. But at this stage Millais retained his Pre-Raphaelite concern for mood and emotion and produced some of his most powerful and moving works. "Autumn Leaves" of 1856 is probably the exemplar of this type of picture. Millais himself said of this picture  that he intended it to be "full of feeling and without subject". By "subject" he meant narrative, there is a subject to this picture but it is not one which can be disentangled form the mood. Indeed it is truer to say that the subject is the mood, one of dreamy reflectiveness on the passing of summer and youth, and by extension, of life itself.

Sir John Millais: Autumn Leaves

Sir John Millais: Sir Isumbras at the Ford

Millais here was showing himself as a forerunner of the Aesthetic movement which is not usually though to have started until about 1860, and with which he is not normally associated. However the idea of dispensing with a literary narrative and painting a picture which is designed to evoke a mood was absolutely central to the Aesthetic movement and could be used as a summation of the work of Moore and Burne-Jones, its greatest painters. Here Millais' colour is at its most glorious, the evening landscape of both "Autumn Leaves", and another of the pictures of this period "Sir Isumbras at the Ford" are wonders of their kind as is the fresh sunlight after a storm in the "The Blind Girl"
It was seeing Millais' work, albeit in reproduction, which first made me aware of what painting could do and keen to try to be a painter myself. Thirty years later I am still proud to record this debt to a painter I regard as one of the greatest ever. In my next post I will introduce a small and possibly unfair caveat to that, but I think it only fair to close this article with a quote from Burne-Jones who after having seen Millais' "Return of the Dove to the Ark" in a private collection in Oxford as a young student, returned home and wrote in a letter to a friend, "and then, we knew"



Sir John Millais: The Return of the Dove to the Ark