There is one element of Millais’s painting which, I think, has never received a full measure of appreciation. Apart from his superb gifts as a painter, he possessed a distinctive mastery in the rendering of certain phases of human emotion that has left him without a rival among the living or the dead. His fine powers as a draughtsman enabled him to press into a single face a quality of sentiment that, by reason of its exquisite delicacy of expression, was saved from the reproach of any sentimentalism.
The desire to capture this deeper beauty in character lay always resident in his nature, but it needed the inspiration of some rarer type of feminine loveliness to quicken it into life. In this sense Millais was to some extent, as I have said, at the mercy of his model, but when that model served him well—as in the case of “The Huguenots” and “Ophelia”—the result yields an image of some indefinable beauty in human character that adds to his innate gifts as a realist a deeper and more passionate truth.
THE HUGUENOT
From the picture by Sir J. E. Millais, Bart., P.R.A.
By permission of Messrs. Methuen and
Messrs. Henry Graves and Co.
To face page 92.
It would be difficult to cite any other master of our school, or indeed of any school, who possessed this special power in quite the same degree. Reynolds and Gainsborough have left examples in the region of female portraiture that render in almost matchless perfection the permanent facts of gentle character; and the different kinds of beauty which they have saved for us bear the unmistakable stamp of a type that is national as well as individual.
But with Millais, whose art no less than theirs rests finally upon this power of interpreting individual features, there was sometimes added, when the model and the subject combined to inspire him, this finer grace of delicate and tender feeling which no one of his predecessors could command. Though not a constant quality of his art, it reappeared from time to time during the whole of his career. He never parted with it as he had parted with that earlier quality of design, which he had only shared for a while with men to whom it was all in all. Though intermittent in its manifestation, it remained with him to the end, and constituted a rare attribute of his art which belonged to him by right of nature and belonged to him alone. It was the appreciation of this quality which caused Watts to write to him in 1878 in regard to “The Bride of Lammermoor,” which had received a decoration in Paris: “Lucy Ashton’s mouth is worthy of any number of medals.” And what is true here is true in a supreme degree of the face of the lady in “The Huguenots” and the face of “Ophelia.”