The extraordinary change which gradually came over the work of Millais after his election to the Associateship of the Royal Academy in 1854—the youngest painter, with the exception of Lawrence, ever admitted to that rank—has been the subject of much criticism and controversy. It has been contended by several writers that Millais lacked original imagination, and could not sustain his early level without the constant inspiration and stimulus of Rossetti and Hunt, both of whom were by this time absorbed in fresh developments of their own. More ardent apologists have claimed that his Pre-Raphaelite period was but a curious episode in Millais’s career; a mere incident in the growth of a genius too brilliant to submit for long to bias from without; and that his impressionable nature was only temporarily swayed by the proselytizing enthusiasm of his comrades. It is hard to attribute the qualities of his finest work—qualities of a high imaginative order, as in “The Eve of St. Agnes,” or “The Enemy Sowing Tares,” to any genius but his own, or to believe that the painter of “Ophelia” and the “Blind Girl” was not himself profoundly moved by the pathos and tragedy which he therein conceived. Nor can it be urged that the exigencies of ill-fortune, the stress of poverty, or any of those dire necessities of fate which have driven many a true artist on the downward road, drove Millais to paint as unblushingly for the Philistine market as he had formerly done for an obscure and despised coterie of artistic revolutionists. Free as he always was of pecuniary care, and favoured by destiny with all the pleasures of domestic and social prosperity, if he was spoilt, it was by success, not failure; if corrupted, it was by popularity, not neglect: though it must be remembered that none of the Pre-Raphaelites can justly pose as martyrs in the matter of a livelihood.
Nor is it permissible to urge that fame, at first well earned and richly justified, entitles any great painter to repudiate the convictions and ideals on which that fame was built, or to play with a reputation won at a heavy cost to himself and others. It can only be assumed that Millais, in forsaking the high and steep paths which he had once chosen, sincerely followed what he felt to be a more excellent way, and honestly believed his decadence to be an advance upon his maturity. To doubt this would be to pass the sternest moral condemnation on an artist of incomparable endowments, and to brand him as the wanton betrayer of a sacred trust, the deliberate concealer of a divine talent, for which, at the ultimate judgment-seat of art, the inevitable account must at last be given.
Speaking of this turning-point in Millais’s career, Mr. Ruskin said in 1857:—“The change in his manner from the years of ‘Ophelia’ and ‘Mariana’ to 1857 is not merely Fall; it is Catastrophe; not merely a loss of power, but a reversal of principle; his excellence has been effaced ‘as a man wipeth a dish—wiping it and turning it upside down.’”
But the Pre-Raphaelite movement, so far from being at an end, was now only emerging from the first tentative phase of its activity. It had yet to be absorbed in a larger reformation, and to act thereby even more potently than if it had remained the specific crusade of a clique or faction. The difficulty which the historian finds at this crisis in the artistic career of Rossetti and his friends, and still more so in their subsequent developments,—the difficulty of defining strictly Pre-Raphaelite work, and of deciding as to who of the now rapidly expanding circle of painters may justly be claimed as Pre-Raphaelites, is itself evidence of the permeating force of the initial movement, and of the ready soil which was prepared for the dissemination of its dominant ideas. For the circle of literary and artistic aspirants, patrons, students, amateurs, and connoisseurs of many grades and varied gifts who now surrounded Dante Rossetti, included men whose names afterwards became honoured in fields of art quite untouched by Pre-Raphaelitism in its distinctive form, but imbued through their influence with fresh and quickening impulses of revival.
One of the most poetic of the painters intimately associated with the Brotherhood was Arthur Hughes, who, though only eighteen at the time of its formation, took an active share in its practical work, and painted, according to its main tenets, with a rare facility and tender charm. He was born in London in 1832, passed through the Academy Schools without much recognition, but won cordial admiration among the limited company who could then appreciate his work, by his beautiful “April Love” in the Academy of 1854. He was also singularly successful at a later date in a subject from Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes”—the source of inspiration for some of the finest work of the Pre-Raphaelite leaders at various times. Like Millais and several others of the band, he attained considerable popularity as an illustrator of books. His religious paintings, moreover, will demand attention among those of his more illustrious friends. “The Cottager’s Return” and “The Reaper and the Flowers” may be remembered, among others of his always graceful pictures, by those who recall the first decade of Pre-Raphaelite propaganda in public exhibitions. He sat as the model for the hero in Millais’s “Proscribed Royalist” of 1853.
Charles Allston Collins, a son of William Collins, R.A., and brother of Wilkie Collins, painted for some time in the manner of the Pre-Raphaelites, but subsequently devoted himself to literature. His first exhibited picture, “Convent Thoughts,” in the Academy of 1850, shared with Millais’s “Christ in the House of His Parents,” the torrent of opprobrium showered on the innovators in that eventful year. Yet three of his works were accepted by the Academy the following season,—“Lyra Innocentium,” on a verse from Keble; representing a young girl in a white gown against a background of blue; “May in the Regent’s Park,” a wonderfully minute study of foliage, as if seen through a window opening close upon the trees; and “The Devout Childhood of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary,” calling to mind the treatment by James Collinson of the familiar renunciation-legend anent the same much-maligned saint. The Elizabeth of the “Childhood” is depicted as a homely-looking little girl of thirteen, kneeling at the iron-barred oaken door of a chapel in the Palace grounds. Her missal is laid on the doorstep beside her, and she is imagined, according to the account of her early piety, to be at prayer on the inhospitable threshold of the shrine to which she cannot for the moment gain access. Charles Collins acted as Millais’s model for “The Hugenot” and “The Black Brunswicker.” He married a daughter of Charles Dickens, who posed with him as the lady in the “Hugenot.”
William L. Windus, a Liverpool artist and member of the Academy of that city, made his modest but genuine fame chiefly through his powerful romantic picture of “Burd Helen,” the “burd” or sweetheart of the Scottish border ballad, who swam the Clyde in order to avenge herself upon a faithless lover. The work was pronounced by Ruskin to rank second only in order of merit to Millais’s “Autumn Leaves” in the Royal Academy of 1856. He painted altogether some eight or ten pictures of a very earnest and imaginative kind, of which one of the finest was entitled “Too Late,” and represented a dying girl whose lover had forsaken her and returned too late for reparation. “The Surgeon’s Daughter” is also remembered as a composition of much chastened and subdued power. Windus ceased painting at an early age, and was lost sight of by the Brotherhood.
Robert B. Martineau was a pupil of Holman Hunt, but painted, among some three or four pictures which constitute the brief total of his achievements, only one of striking merit,—“The Last Day in the Old Home,” which for sincerity and depth of feeling won considerable appreciation in 1865. His career was cut short by untimely death soon afterwards.
Cave Thomas, who so infelicitously christened “The Germ,” had gained a prize in the Westminster Cartoon competition, and was the painter of one very beautiful picture, “The Protestant Lady,” exhibited in the Academy, and greatly admired by the Brotherhood. He published in 1860 a monograph entitled “Pre-Raphaelitism Tested by the Principles of Christianity;” and subsequently became art professor to the Princess of Wales.
Mr. Frederick Sandys was not personally known to the leading Pre-Raphaelites until 1857, and was by that time too original and accomplished an artist to be claimed by them as a disciple, but his work was for some time intimately associated with theirs. He was to the last a valued friend of Rossetti, who always affirmed that while in draughtsmanship he had no superior in English art, his imaginative endowment was of the richest and rarest kind.