Sir John Everett Millais

by A. L. Baldry

THE VALE OF REST.

On the other hand it is possible to select from among his subject pictures several that prove him to have had brilliant moments when he could reach the greater heights of pictorial invention. There are quite half a dozen of his canvases which by their wonderful vitality, their deep significance, and force of expression make good a claim to the possession of the finest kind of mastery. The Vale of Rest, The North-West Passage, The Order of Release, The Ruling Passion, The Boyhood of Raleigh, and perhaps Effie Deans show that he could grasp with all possible firmness and state with unflinching decision, motives that called for great mental exertion. Their qualities are those that come from a minute insight not only into details of character, but also into the principles which govern the dramatic side of pictorial art. No false note spoils the harmony of these compositions, no touch of uncertainty or divided opinion; they are confident and assured, and their meaning is not to be questioned. They express the thoughts of a man who, with all his straightforwardness and simplicity, could now and then look beneath the surface and work out problems far more profound than it was his every-day habit to investigate.

His romance, especially, had this merit of being well thought out. It was never complicated by excess of details, and was strict in its adherence to the main facts of the story, without irrelevant matter introduced to complete picturesquely an imperfect conception. The Knight Errant is a very good example of his method of dealing with an incident evolved from his own fancy; and Victory, O Lord! is equally characteristic as an instance of the power with which he could seize upon the salient points of a subject suggested to him by written history. Many of his finer paintings were illustrative records of the impressions made upon him by things he had read, and expressions of the instinct that brought him throughout his life such success as a draughtsman in black and white; but they were only occasionally direct illustrations of particular passages from books. More often what he gave was his view of what might have happened, rather than a plain reproduction in paint of what was already fixed in words.

He preferred to base himself more upon the spirit than the letter of a story, to find a new reading for himself, and to treat it with a considerable degree of independence. In The Princes in the Tower he followed none of the accepted versions, and in Effie Deans he made a subject out of the slightest possible suggestion in the text of the romance; yet both pictures show that peculiar air of conviction which results from a perfect understanding of what is essential for the proper application of dramatic material. In these, as in almost all his renderings of incident, appears his habit of attacking not the climax of the story, but rather one of its earlier stages, an intermediate moment when the action is still in progress and the final result is suggested rather than clearly foreshadowed. This habit was always strong upon him. It gave their particular interest to such early works as The Huguenot, The Black Brunswicker, The Proscribed Royalist, and The Escape of a Heretic, just as much as it did to later pictures like The Girlhood of St. Theresa, or Speak! Speak!; and by introducing a touch of speculation into the record of his thoughts he enhanced the fascination which was never wanting in his sturdy inventions.

Indeed, there was in every branch of his figure-painting some sufficient reason for his popularity, some distinct attractiveness of mental quality to add convincingly to the impression created by his superlative command over technicalities. He could be tender, dainty, and refined in his studies of children; serious and solemn in his symbolical compositions; pathetic, vigorous, and passionate by turns in his subject-pictures; and through all ran a vein of sentiment that was always wholesome, clean, and intelligible. He never affected to be influenced by feelings that were not honestly natural to him, nor did he pretend to represent anything that he did not believe in sincerely and without question. What he painted was invariably what he felt at the moment; and, whether it was a masterpiece or a comparative failure it expressed simply the appeal that the subject had made to him; and his response to this appeal was always unconventional and definite.

He trusted in the same way to a personal impression of his sitter when he set himself to paint a portrait. What he wanted was to show that he understood the individuality of the man or woman before him, and that his understanding had helped him to make clear to others the special idiosyncrasies that separated that man or woman from the ordinary crowd. Portraiture to him was a matter of observation, of receptiveness to suggestion, and acceptance of what was visible, rather than an artistic process which enabled him to give free scope to his inventive instincts.

Perhaps he was less analytical and discriminating in his pictures of women. They seemed to appeal to him less than men did as subjects for psychological study. What he preferred to dwell upon were the physical charms of femininity, beauty of face and form, elegance of carriage, and that rounded fulness of development that argues perfect healthiness of body and mind. The stateliness of the card-players in Hearts are Trumps, the air of high breeding and conscious power which distinguishes the portrait of the Duchess of Westminster, and the more matronly splendour of Mrs. Bischoffsheim, mark the chief variations in his manner of painting womankind; occasionally only did he diverge into more detailed character, as in Miss Eveleen Tennant, Mrs. Jopling, and Mrs. Perugini; but as a rule he was content to treat the freshness and brilliant vitality of his feminine sitters, and to leave untouched their possibilities of passion or strong emotion. His men were full of vigorous aspirations, restrained for the moment, yet near the surface and ready at any time to break into activity; but his women were serene and unmoved, prepared, perhaps, for conquest, but wrapped in a reserve that would not allow them to make the first advances.

That his preference for repose in representation did not lead the artist into a dry convention, or into any disregard of the essential points of difference between people, is very evident if a comparison is made of his chief portraits. Beneath their reserve appears a wonderful variety of manner, and a superb power of interpretation. They are studied, exact, and intensely real. No perfunctory labour is seen in them, and their value is diminished by no slurring over of the little things which help to define the more intimate characteristics of the modern man.

The unquestionable popularity that Millais gained by his excursions into landscape was equally due to the fact that he was a student of nature, not an imaginative interpreter of what she presented. He dealt with facts and left fancies almost entirely alone. In the series of canvases that began with Chill October, and ended with Halcyon Weather, there was infinite industry, marvellous accuracy, perfect veracity of record, but little effort to be anything but absolutely exact in his statement of what he saw. His amazing patience and his surprising quickness of vision, enabled him to grasp with easy confidence the plain truths of nature, and his command of brushwork ensured a rare perfection in his pictorial expression of the matter that he had selected for representation. Nothing was implied or left in sketchy incompleteness, because his patience had failed him before he had realised the complicated fulness of his subject. He spared himself no toil to arrive at what seemed to him to be the perfection of nature, and he was as minutely attentive, as surely certain of himself, as he ever was in his figure work.

As a necessary consequence, however, of this manner of working, he never could be ranked among the inspired painters of the open air, nor could he ever be said to have dealt exhaustively with the problems presented by natural phenomena. He remained untouched by the subtleties of atmospheric effect, by the varieties of momentary illumination, or by the fleeting glories of aerial colour, which provide the student of nature's devices with the chief incentive to artistic effort. He was always too much concerned with the things at his feet, with matter that he could dissect and investigate, to give much thought to the broad and comprehensive scheme of which these things formed part. Whatever he arrived at in the way of a record of a natural effect was reached not so much by thorough understanding of the effect as a whole, as by an amazingly acute interpretation of the influence exercised by it upon the details upon which his eyes were fixed.