Plate
I.The Order of Release, 1746[Frontispiece]
At the Tate Gallery
Page
II.The Boyhood of Raleigh[14]
At the Tate Gallery
III.The Knight Errant[24]
At the Tate Gallery
IV.Autumn Leaves[34]
At Manchester Art Gallery
V.Speak! Speak![40]
At the Tate Gallery
VI.The Vale of Rest[50]
At the Tate Gallery
VII.Ophelia[60]
At the Tate Gallery
VIII.The North-West Passage[70]
At the Tate Gallery

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. He had none of the hard struggle for recognition, or of the fight against adverse circumstances, which have too often embittered the earlier years of men destined to take eventually the highest rank in their profession. Things went well with him from the first; he gained attention at an age when most painters have barely begun to make a bid for popularity, and his position was assured almost before he had arrived at man’s estate. He owed some of his success, no doubt, to his attractive and vigorous personality, but it was due in far greater measure to the extraordinary powers which he manifested from the very outset of his career.

PLATE II.—THE BOYHOOD OF RALEIGH

(Tate Gallery)

It would not be inappropriate to describe the “Boyhood of Raleigh” as the prologue to the romance of which the last chapter is written in the “North-West Passage,” for in both pictures the artist suggests the fascination of the adventurous life. Young Raleigh and his boy friend are under the spell of the story which the sailor is telling them, a story evidently of engrossing interest and stimulating to the imagination. The faces of the lads show how inspiring they find this tale of strange experiences in lands beyond the sea.

For there was something almost sensational in the manner of his development, in his unusual precocity, and in the youthful self-confidence which enabled him to take a prominent place among the leaders of artistic opinion while he was still little more than a boy. So early was the proof given that he possessed absolutely uncommon powers, that he was not more than nine years old when he began serious art training; and so evident even then was his destiny that this training was commenced on the advice of Sir Martin Archer Shee, the President of the Royal Academy, to whom the child’s performances had been submitted by parents anxious for an expert opinion. The President’s declaration when he saw these early efforts, that “nature had provided for the boy’s success,” was emphatic enough to dissipate any doubts there might have been whether or not young Millais was to be encouraged in his artistic inclinations; and that this emphasis was justified by subsequent results no one to-day can dispute.