But in this disregard of convention there is a kind of summing up of his beliefs as an artist. Though he had changed the outward aspect of his art he was still in spirit a Pre-Raphaelite, and a Pre-Raphaelite he remained to the end of his days. He depended more upon the keenness of vision natural to him, and assiduously cultivated by years of close observation, than upon what powers he may have had of abstract imagining; and he sought to only a limited extent to set down upon his canvas those mental images which satisfy men who look upon nature chiefly as a basis for decorative designs. The mental image with him was a direct reflection of fact, not an adaptation modified and formalised in accordance with recognised rules, not a fancy more or less remotely referable to reality; but he had certainly an ample equipment of that taste which enables the painter to discriminate between the realities which are too crude and obvious to be worth recording, and those which by their inherent beauty claim a permanent place in an artist’s memory. He had, too, the judgment to see that the nude, treated as it would have to be to satisfy his æsthetic conscience, would be too plainly stated to be entirely acceptable.
He found a much more appropriate field for the exercise of his particular capacities by turning to landscape painting. Many of his earlier figure compositions had been given backgrounds which showed how well he could manage the complex details of masses of tangled vegetation, or the broad and simple lines of a piece of rural scenery; but in 1871 he attempted for the first time a landscape which was complete in itself and not merely incidental in a picture mainly concerned with human interest. This landscape, “Chill October,” was at the Academy with his “Yes or No?” “Victory, O Lord,” “A Somnambulist,” and the “Portrait of George Grote,” and it was welcomed by a host of admirers as a new revelation of his versatility. It has certainly qualities which justify the estimation in which it was and is still held; and though it lacks that imaginative insight into poetic subtleties which accounts for so much in the work of a master like Turner, it must always claim the respect of art lovers as a large, dignified, and sincere study of nature in one of her sadder moods. It is the reserve of the picture, its reticent realism, that chiefly makes it memorable, for it is neither imposing in subject nor striking in effect; but in its broad simplicity there is something rarely fascinating.
Other nature studies of the same character followed at brief intervals during the next few years; they added to the interest of the artist’s practice, but they can scarcely be said to have equalled in importance the portraits and figure subjects which he completed at this stage of his career. Millais was, of course, far too great a master to have failed in any branch of artistic practice to which he seriously devoted himself, but the very capacities which made him so successful as a painter of the human subject prevented him from looking at open-air nature with the necessary degree of abstraction. The physical character of a piece of scenery, its details and individual peculiarities, he could record with absolute certainty, though the elusive subtleties of atmosphere, and the charming accidents of illumination, which mean so much in the poetic rendering of landscape, he dwelt upon hardly at all. In many of his landscapes the breadth and dignity, the accurate relation of part to part, the fascinating simplicity of manner, which are among the greater merits of “Chill October,” can be praised without reservation or hesitation; but the touch of fantasy, of actual unreality, by which the inspired landscape painter seems to suggest more truly the real spirit of nature, he hardly ever attempted; and never, it may fairly be said, with complete success.
(Tate Gallery)
Realism more searching and more significant than that which Millais sought for and attained in this small canvas would hardly come within the bounds of possibility. But the picture is much more than a simple study of facts; it has an exquisite charm of poetic feeling, and it is conceived with a full measure of the tenderness needed in a representation of the most pathetic of all Shakespeare’s heroines. Such a work has a place, definite and indisputable, among the classics of art, and counts as one of the chief masterpieces of the British School.
The years over which his activity as an exponent of pure landscape extended are, however, memorable because they saw the production of some of the most triumphant achievements of his maturer life. With his two landscapes, “Flowing to the Sea,” and “Flowing to the River,” he exhibited in 1872 his “Hearts are Trumps,” a portrait group which has become a modern classic; and in 1873 another wonderful portrait, the three-quarter length of “Mrs. Bischoffsheim.” But it was in 1874 that he showed what is in many ways the greatest of all his paintings, “The North-West Passage,” a work which, if he had done nothing else of moment, would suffice to place him securely among the master painters of the world. The head of the old man, who is the central figure in the picture, is entirely magnificent, and there is much besides in this canvas which would have been beyond the reach of any one but an artist of almost abnormal power. This was followed in 1875 by his portrait of “Miss Eveleen Tennant,” and in 1877 by the “Yeoman of the Guard,” which runs “The North-West Passage” close in the race for supremacy.
At this time, indeed, his productiveness was extraordinary; subject pictures, portraits, and landscapes appeared in rapid succession, and in all of them he kept to a level of masterly practice which other men reach only occasionally and at rare intervals. Between 1873 and 1879 he painted eight landscapes, all important in scale and interesting in treatment, but after 1879 he produced no more for nearly ten years, when he began a fresh series. He was apparently too busy with portraits and figure subjects to give much time to out-of-door work, and to satisfy the demands made upon him by art collectors and sitters he must have had to work his hardest. Yet popularity did not make him careless, and his hard work diminished neither his freshness of outlook nor his freedom of expression. Conscientiousness as a craftsman was always one of his virtues, and the knowledge that he had a host of admirers ready to accept almost anything he would give them had certainly not the effect of inducing him to lower his standard.
In the long list of his paintings, which belong to the period beginning in 1879 and ending in 1888, several stand out with special prominence—for example, his portraits of “Mrs. Jopling,” and “The Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone,” “Cherry Ripe,” and “The Princess Elizabeth,” all in 1879, “The Right Hon. John Bright” in 1880, “Cardinal Newman,” “Alfred, Lord Tennyson,” “Sir Henry Thompson,” “Cinderella,” and “Caller Herrin’,” in 1881, “J. C. Hook, R.A.,” and “The Captive,” in 1882, “The Marquess of Salisbury” in 1883, “The Ruling Passion,” and another portrait of Gladstone, in 1885, “Bubbles” in 1886, and “The Marquess of Hartington” in 1887. Some of these were shown at the Academy, but he was producing far more year by year than could be exhibited there, so he sent many important works to the Grosvenor Gallery, and most of his subject pictures to the galleries of the dealers by whom they were commissioned.