After 1888 there was some relaxation in his effort; in that year he had at the Academy only one picture, a landscape, “Murthly Moss,” and only one portrait in each of the years 1889 and 1890, though he showed several works in other galleries. In 1892 his landscapes “Halcyon Weather,” and “Blow, Blow, thou Winter Wind,” were at the Academy, but after that year he worked no more out-of-doors. Of the canvases painted during the last three or four years of his life, the most memorable are his portrait of “John Hare” (1893), “Speak! Speak!” (1895), and “A Forerunner” (1896), all of which were at the Academy, and “Time the Reaper” which was at the New Gallery in 1895. “Speak! Speak!” was purchased by the Chantrey Fund trustees, and is now in the National Gallery of British Art with the other admirably chosen examples of his art which were given to the nation by Sir Henry Tate.

The crowning honour of his life came to him in February 1896, when he was elected President of the Royal Academy in succession to Lord Leighton—an honour which was particularly appropriate not only because of his eminence as an artist, but also because he had been intimately connected for nearly sixty years with the institution over which he was then called to preside. To this connection he referred in his speech at the Academy banquet in 1895, at which he took the chair in the place of Leighton whose illness prevented him from occupying his accustomed position. The words which Millais used on this occasion expressed generously and affectionately his sense of obligation to the Academy by which he had been trained in his boyhood, and from which he had received encouragement and support at the most critical period of his career, and declared with characteristic frankness that he owed to it a debt of gratitude which he never could repay.

PLATE VIII.—THE NORTH-WEST PASSAGE

(Tate Gallery)

Even if the “North-West Passage” were not the masterly piece of painting that it is, it would still be a picture of importance because it appeals so vividly to the national spirit of adventure. The old Arctic explorer, no longer able to satisfy his still strenuous inclinations, listens to the record of his past activities which is being read to him by his daughter, and yearns once more to battle with the hardships which must be faced by the traveller in the frozen north. The old man’s head, one of the finest technical achievements in modern art, was painted from Trelawny, the friend of Byron, and Shelley.

To those, however, who know how loyal he was to the institution that he loved so well it would seem that the debt was, indeed, fully paid. Few men have done more to uphold the repute of the Academy, few have by the brilliancy of their powers and their charm of personality done it more credit. That Leighton was the ideal President can be readily admitted, but Millais, as his successor, would have carried on a great tradition with dignity and sympathy and with no diminution of his predecessor’s generous tolerance and earnest sense of artistic responsibility. He would have kept the Academy on broad lines, and by his impatience of empty formalities he would have prevented it from losing touch with the movements in modern art.

But, unfortunately, he was destined to hold his honourable office for but a brief time. Even before Leighton’s death he had been suffering from a throat trouble which not long after was pronounced to be cancer; and in the months that followed immediately on his election the disease made rapid progress. Not long after the opening of the 1896 Academy Exhibition his condition became so serious that an immediately fatal result was expected; but by an operation he obtained some temporary relief and his life was prolonged for a few weeks. This, however, was only a brief respite; he died on August 13, and was buried a week later in St. Paul’s Cathedral, where little more than six months before he had followed his old friend’s body to the grave.

To speak of his death as premature would be scarcely a misapplication of the word. Although Millais had completed his sixty-seventh year he was still in art a young man. His vigour had not waned, and there was no perceptible diminution of his artistic vitality even in those last works which he painted under the shadow of nearly impending death. To a man of his splendid physique and buoyant temperament age would have come slowly, and the inevitable degeneration of his powers would have not begun for many more years. The possibility of great achievement remained to him, and it would be true to say that his death robbed us of much which would have added greatly to the sum total of British art. Yet we may be grateful to fate for allowing him to develop the promise of his youth in the splendour of his maturer years; it is so often the lot of the precocious genius to die young with his mission but half fulfilled. If death had come to Millais as it did to Bonington or Fred Walker, our loss would have been sad indeed.

In discussing Millais as an artist the part which his personality played in making him what he was must by no means be overlooked. Something of the vitality and the virility of his art was due to the way in which he kept touch with the life about him, and interested himself in people and things. He was no recluse who fed in secret upon his own ideas, or narrowed his outlook by hedging himself round with prejudices and preferences for one special class of artistic material. Instead, he went out into the world and acquired his impressions of humanity in all directions and at first hand, finding much pleasure in association with his fellow-men. To his own human nature he gave free rein; he was a keen sportsman, a lover of children—of whose ways he had, as he proved in scores of pictures, a perfect understanding—and a man who was always happy in congenial society, and always welcome. He lived his life, in fact, largely, genially, and wholesomely, and he was as much unspoiled by the prosperity which came to him in his maturer years as he was unshaken by the opposition which he had to face in that brief period of his youth when, as he used to say himself, he was “so dreadfully bullied.”