It is interesting, too, to note that just at the moment when the attack was fiercest the Royal Academy showed its faith in Millais by electing him an Associate. He is said to have been the youngest student ever received into the Academy schools, and he must have been one of the youngest painters ever chosen as an Associate, for after his election it was discovered that he had not reached the age at which, under the Academy rules, admission to the Associateship was possible. So his election had to be declared invalid and he had to wait some few years longer—until 1853—for the official recognition of his claims. But it must assuredly be counted to the credit of the Academy that such readiness should have been shown to admit the ability of a young artist who was openly in rebellion against the fashions of his time, and whose work was by implication a condemnation of much that was being done even by members of the Academic circle.
His election in 1853 came more as a matter of course; by that date he had won his way to a position which could scarcely be questioned even by the bitterest opponents of Pre-Raphaelitism, and he had laid securely the foundations of that remarkable popularity which he was destined to enjoy for the rest of his life. It would have been hard, indeed, to deny that he deserved whatever rewards were due to artistic merit of the highest order, for his pictures had passed well beyond the stage of brilliant promise into that of commanding achievement. His “Ophelia” and “The Huguenot” in 1852, his “Order of Release” and “The Proscribed Royalist” in 1853, and his exquisite “Portrait of Mr. Ruskin” in 1854, are to be accounted as masterly performances which would have done full credit to a painter whose skill had been matured by more than half a lifetime of strenuous effort, and which, as the productions of a young man who did not reach his twenty-fifth birthday until the summer of 1854, are of really extraordinary importance. The “Ophelia,” “The Huguenot,” and “The Order of Release,” can be placed, indeed, among the most memorable expositions of his artistic conviction, and the “Portrait of Mr. Ruskin” ranks with the “Ophelia” as one of the most astonishing examples of searching and faithful study which can be found in modern art.
(Tate Gallery)
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. 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.
These pictures were followed closely by others not less notable—by “The Rescue” in 1855, by “Autumn Leaves,” “The Random Shot,” “The Blind Girl,” and “Peace Concluded,” in 1856, and by “Sir Isumbras at the Ford,” “The Escape of a Heretic,” and “News from Home,” in 1857. Of this group “Sir Isumbras at the Ford” was the least successful, but “Autumn Leaves,” with its exquisite delicacy of sentiment, and those two delightful little canvases, “The Blind Girl,” and “The Random Shot,” are of supreme interest both on account of the depth of thought which they reveal and of their splendid executive accomplishment.
Another great picture appeared in 1859—“The Vale of Rest,” which differed from most of the works which Millais had hitherto produced in its larger qualities of handling and more serious symbolism. Its special importance was not fully realised by the artist’s admirers when it was first exhibited, but Millais himself looked upon it as the best thing he had done; and this opinion has since been generally recognised as sufficiently well founded. He had not before shown so much solemnity of feeling nor quite so complete a grasp of the larger pictorial essentials, though in “Autumn Leaves” there was decidedly more than a hint of the seriousness of purpose which gave authority and dignity of style to “The Vale of Rest.”
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. So he alternated between the literalism of “The Black Brunswicker” (1860), “The White Cockade” (1862), “My First Sermon” (1863), “My Second Sermon” (1864), and “Asleep” and “Awake,” which were shown in 1867 with that daintiest of all his earlier paintings, “The Minuet,” and the sombre suggestion of such imaginative pictures as “The Enemy Sowing Tares,” and the finely conceived “Eve of St. Agnes,” of which the former was exhibited at the Academy in 1865, and the latter in 1863. It seemed as if he was trying to make up his mind as to the direction he was to take for the future, testing his powers in various ways, and studying himself to see how his wishes and his temperament could best be brought into accord.
But when in 1868 he broke into the new art world in which he was to reign supreme for nearly thirty years, his abandonment of the technical methods which he had adopted in 1849, and used ever since with comparatively little modification, was as decisive as it was surprising. In 1867 he was the careful, searching, and literal student of small details, precise in brushwork, and exactly realistic in his record of what he had microscopically examined. His “Asleep” and “Awake” were in his most matter-of-fact vein, almost pedantically accurate in statement of obvious facts; and even his charming “Minuet” was elaborated with a care that left nothing for the imagination to supply. In 1868, however, all this dwelling upon little things, all this studied minuteness of touch and literal presentation of what was obvious, had suddenly disappeared. All that remained to him of his Pre-Raphaelitism was the acuteness of vision which had served him so well for twenty years in his intimate examination of nature; everything else had gone, his minute actuality was replaced by large and generous suggestion, his restrained brushwork by the broadest and most emphatic handling, his realistic view by a kind of magnificent impressionism which expressed rightly enough the personal robustness of the man himself.