Some eminent Victorians: Personal recollections in the world of art and letters

by J. Comyns Carr

“You know, Carr, as I look at these things there are some of them which seem to say to me, ‘Millais, you’re a fine painter,’ and this is one”—pointing as he spoke to the beautiful picture before us—“and there are others,” he added, his tones suddenly changing from triumph to dejection, “that tell me just as plainly, ‘Millais, you’re a damned vulgar fellow!’ Oh, but there are!” he cried, as though anticipating my polite protest. “If you don’t believe me, look at that,” and he pointed to a picture I need not now name, but which he looked at with unfeigned resentment and disgust.

There was one little incident connected with that exhibition which I shall not readily forget. After many efforts, at first unsuccessful, we had at last persuaded the owner of “The Huguenot” to lend it for the occasion; but this favourable answer to our request only reached us when the rest of the exhibition was already arranged. It so chanced that Millais had not seen the picture since the year 1852 when it was painted, and he was therefore particularly anxious that it should be included in the exhibition.

It was late in the evening when the picture arrived in its case from Preston; but Millais had waited, evidently in some trepidation as to how this first triumph of his youth would impress him when he saw it again. Its place had been reserved on the wall, and the carpenters, quickly unscrewing the case, held up the picture for the painter to see.

Millais was standing beside me as they hurried forward in their work, and I felt his arm tremble on my shoulder during the few moments that prefaced its appearance; and then, when at last it was raised to its place, he said in a voice that was half broken by emotion, “Well, well, not so damned bad for a youngster.” And lighting his little wooden pipe hurried out of the Gallery and took his way downstairs into the street.

In later days we met constantly in the card-room at the Garrick, and as we both lived in Kensington it happened often that we used to walk homeward together. Sometimes I would come across him in the daytime strolling in Kensington Gardens, and I remember one snowy Sunday in winter when I had carelessly said to him, “How ugly snow is!” Millais turned to me with sudden vehemence and said, “Carr, how can you say that? Nothing in nature is ugly.” And I think to him it was as he said.

I know at the time I was forcibly reminded of a phrase used by Constable which betrays the same unfailing faith in nature. “There is nothing,” said the earlier painter, “either beautiful or ugly but light and shade makes it so.”

The power of selection in the facts he chose to render was never among the strongest of Millais’s artistic gifts; perhaps to him the need of it seemed not so great as to others. His mastery in the rendering of every aspect of reality, a mastery exercised with impartial regard upon the facts of human form or the complex growth of outward nature, was so complete, and so completely enjoyed, that he had scarcely the inclination to reject any one part of the subject presented to him in favour of another.

His art knew little preference, and for that reason it often lacked the higher sense of composition that painters, differently though perhaps not so greatly gifted, can command for their work. And so it was that the spiritual appeal of his painting varied extraordinarily according to the degree in which the theme had inspired him, and even more according to the measure of support which he received from the chosen model before his eyes.

And yet, to the last, that inspiration, when it came, could summon, almost undimmed, all that concentrated power in the rendering of life, animate and inanimate, that had set so clear a stamp upon those beautiful paintings of the period of his youth.

Lovable I think he was in an extraordinary degree to all who were brought in contact with him, and I know for my own part that as I knew him more, I was the more attracted by his personality. At the last, as he lay dying in Palace Gate, he sent a message to say he would like to see me, but when I reached the house his son greeted me at the door with the sad verdict that it was too late. Already the hand of Death was upon him: within a few hours he had passed away.