SIR JOHN MILLAIS
HIS LIFE
Although John Everett Millais was born, on June 8, 1829, at Portland Place, Southampton, his father was an inhabitant of Jersey, and a member of a family which had been settled in that island from a date anterior to the Norman conquest. The first five years of the child's life were spent in Jersey, but in 1835 he was taken by his parents to Dinan, in Brittany, where he began, by his sketches of the scenery of the place and the types of the people, to give the first convincing proofs of the remarkable artistic capacity that was in him. These early efforts were so surprising, and attracted so much attention outside his family circle, that when he was not more than nine years old he was brought to London for an expert opinion on his chances in the profession for which he seemed predestined. The President of the Royal Academy, Sir Martin Archer Shee, was consulted, and his encouraging declaration, that "Nature had provided for the boy's success," decided the future of the young artist, who was at once allowed to begin serious study.
In 1838 he entered the drawing-school in Bloomsbury which was carried on by Henry Sass, and regarded as the best available place for the training of budding genius. In the same year he took the silver medal of the Society of Arts, for a drawing from the antique, and caused quite a sensation when he appeared, at the distribution of the prizes, to receive his award from the Duke of Sussex, who was presiding. The surprise of the spectators is said to have been unbounded when "Mr. Millais" came forward, a small child in a pinafore, to answer to his name, and even the officials at first found it hard to believe that he could be really the winner of the medal.
For two years he remained under the tuition of Mr. Sass, and, helped by his teaching and by a good deal of work from the casts in the British Museum, the boy developed so rapidly that when he was only eleven years old he gained admission to the Royal Academy Schools, the youngest student, it is said, that has ever been received into them. His career there was a series of successes. For six years he laboured indefatigably, and plainly proved his ability by taking prize after prize, beginning with a silver medal in 1843, and ending, in 1847, with the gold medal for a historical picture, The Tribe of Benjamin seizing the Daughters of Shiloh.
Subjects of this type seem at that time to have attracted him strongly, and to have occupied a great deal of his attention, for in 1846 he had painted, and exhibited at the Academy, Pizarro seizing the Inca of Peru, which is now in the South Kensington Museum, and in the following year another study of violent action, Elgiva seized by Order of Archbishop Odo. To 1847 also belongs the great design, The Widow bestowing her Mite, for the Westminster Hall competition, a canvas fourteen feet long by ten feet high, covered with life-size figures. Such an effort speaks well for the energy and ambition of a lad of eighteen, who could within the space of a few months carry out so vast an undertaking in addition to the Elgiva, and his gold medal picture.
So far his progress had been, from the point of view of his elder contemporaries, very promising and satisfactory. He had proved himself to be possessed of unusual gifts; and apparently historical art was to have in him an exponent of rather a rare type, a painter who would carry on its traditions with some degree of vitality. But really he had only been feeling his way, and, not having had time as yet to analyse his inclinations, he had temporarily accepted, with youthful imitativeness, the precepts of his teachers and fellow-students. It did not take him long to discover that he was on the wrong track, and to decide that there was in another direction a far better opportunity for the assertion of his own independent convictions.