Madox Brown passed his youth on the Continent—in Antwerp with Wappers, in Paris, and in Rome. The pictures which he painted there in the beginning of the forties were produced, as regards technique, under the influence of Wappers. The subjects were taken from Byron: “The Sleep of Parisina” and “Manfred on the Jungfrau.” It is only in the latter that an independent initiative is perceptible. In contradistinction from the generalities of the school of Wappers he aimed at greater depth of psychology and accuracy of costume, while at the same time he endeavoured, though without success, to replace the conventional studio light by the carefully observed effect of free light. These three things—truth of colour, of spiritual expression, and of historical character—were from this time forth his principal care. And when his cartoon of “Harold,” painted in Paris in the year 1844, was exhibited in Westminster Hall, it was chiefly this scrupulous effort at truth which made such a vivid impression upon the younger generation. In the first masterpiece which he painted after his return to London in 1848 he stands out already in all his rugged individuality. “Lear and Cordelia,” founded on a most tragic passage in the most tragic of the great dramas of Shakespeare, is here treated with impressive cogency. It stood in such abrupt opposition to the traditional historical painting that perhaps nothing was ever so sharply opposed to anything so universally accepted. The figures stand out stiff and parti-coloured like card kings, without fluency of line or rounded and generalised beauty. And the colouring is just as incoherent. The brown sauce, which every one had hitherto respected like a binding social law, had given way to a bright joy of colour, the half-barbaric motley which one finds in old miniatures. It is only when one studies the brilliant details, used merely in the service of a great psychological effect, that this outwardly repellent picture takes shape as a powerful work of art, a work of profound human truth. Nothing is sacrificed to pose, graceful show, or histrionic affectation. Like the German masters of the fifteenth century, Madox Brown makes no attempt to dilute what is ugly, nor did Holbein either when he painted the leprous beggars in his “Altar to St. Sebastian.” Every figure, whether fair or foul, is, in bearing, expression, and gesture, a character of robust and rigorous hardihood, and has that intense fulness of life which is compressed in those carved wooden figures of mediæval altars: the aged Lear with his weather-beaten face and his waving beard; the envious Regan; the cold, cruel, ambitious Goneril; Albany, with his fair, inexpressive head; the gross, brutal Cornwall; Burgundy, biting his nails in indecision; and Cordelia, in her touching, bashful grace. And to this angular frankness of the primitive masters he unites the profound learning of the modern historian. All the archæological details, the old British costumes, jewels, modes of wearing the hair, weapons, furniture, and hangings, have been studied with the accuracy of Menzel. He knows nothing of the academic rules of composition, and his robes fall naturally without the petty appendage of fair folds and graceful motives.

Brothers, photo.
MILLAIS.THE HUGUENOT.MILLAIS.AUTUMN LEAVES.

The picture in which he treated the balcony scene in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is outwardly repellent, like “Lear and Cordelia,” but what a hollow effect is made by Makart’s theatrical heroics beside this aboriginal sensuousness, this intensity of expression! Juliet’s dress has fallen from her shoulders, and, devoid of will and thought, with closed lids, half-naked, and thrilling in every fibre with the lingering joy of the hours that have passed, she abandons herself to the last fiery embraces of Romeo, who in stormy haste is feeling with one foot for the ladder of ropes.

He has solved a yet more difficult problem in the picture “Elijah and the Widow.”

“See, thy son liveth,” are the words in the Bible with which the hoary Elijah brings the boy, raised from death and still enveloped in his shroud, to the agonised mother kneeling at the foot of the sepulchre. The woman makes answer: “Now by this I know that thou art a man of God.” In the embodiment of this scene likewise Madox Brown has aimed in costume and accessories at a complete harmony between the figures and the character of the epoch, and has set out with an entirely accurate study of Assyrian and Egyptian monuments. Even the inscription on the wall and the Egyptian antiquities correspond to ancient originals. At the same time the figures have been given the breath of new life. Elijah looks more like a wild aboriginal man than a saint of the Cinquecento. The ecstasy of the mother, the astonishment of the child whose great eyes, still unaccustomed to the light, gaze into the world again with a dreamy effort, after having beheld the mysteries of death—these are things depicted with an astonishing power. The downright but convincing method in which Hogarth paints the soul has dislodged the hollow, heroical ideal of beauty of the older historical painting. Madox Brown’s confession of faith, which he formulated as an author, culminates in the tenet that truth is the means of art, its end being the quickening of the soul. This he expresses in two words: “emotional truth.”

While Holman Hunt and Madox Brown held fast throughout their lives to the pre-Raphaelite principles, pre-Raphaelitism was for John Everett Millais, the youngest of the three, merely a transitory phase, a stage in his artistic development.

L’Art.
MILLAIS.   THE YEOMAN OF THE GUARD.

Sir John Millais was born 8th June 1829, in Southampton, where his family had come from Jersey. Thus he is half a Frenchman by descent. His childhood was passed in Dinant in Brittany, but when he was nine years old he went to a London school of drawing. He was then the little fair-haired boy in a holland blouse, a broad sash, and a large sailor’s collar, whom John Phillip painted in those days. When eleven he entered the Royal Academy, probably being the youngest pupil there; at thirteen he won a prize medal for the best drawing from the antique; at fifteen he was already painting; and at seventeen he exhibited an historical picture, “Pizarro seizing the Inca of Peru,” which was praised by the critics as the best in the exhibition of 1846. With “Elgiva,” a work exhibited in 1847, this first period, in which he followed the lines of the now forgotten painter Hilton, was brought to an end. His next work, “Lorenzo and Isabella,” now in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, bore the letters P.R.B., as a sign of his new confession of faith. Microscopically exact work in detail has taken the place of the large bravura and the empty imitation of the Cinquecentisti. The theme was borrowed from one of Boccaccio’s tales, The Pot of Basil—the tale on which Keats founded Isabella. A company of Florentines in the costume of the thirteenth century are assembled at dinner. Lorenzo, pale and in suppressed excitement, sits beside the lovely Isabella, looking at her with a glance of deep, consuming passion. Isabella’s brother, angered at it, gives a kick to her dog. All the persons at the table are likenesses. The critic F. G. Stephens sat for the beloved of Isabella, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti for the toper holding his glass to his lips at the far right of the table. Even the ornaments upon the damask cloth, the screen, and the tapestry in the background are painted, stroke after stroke, with the conscientious devotion of a primitive painter. Jan van Eyck’s brilliancy of colour is united to Perugino’s suavity of feeling, and the chivalrous spirit of the Decameron seized with the sureness of a subtle literary scholar.

The work of 1850, “The Child Jesus in the Workshop of Joseph the Carpenter,” illustrated a verse in the Bible (Zechariah xiii. 6): “And one shall say unto Him, What are these wounds in Thine hands? Then He shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of My friends.” The Child Jesus, who is standing before the joiner’s bench, has hurt Himself in the hand. St. Joseph is leaning over to look at the wound, and Mary is kneeling beside the Child, trying to console Him with her caresses, whilst the little St. John is bringing water in a wooden vessel. Upon the other side of the bench stands the aged Anna, in the act of drawing out of the wood the nail which has caused the injury. A workman is labouring busily at the joiner’s bench. The floor of the workshop is littered with shavings, and tools hang round upon the walls. The Quattrocentisti were likewise the determining influence in the treatment of this subject. Ascetic austerity has taken the place of ideal draperies, and angularity that of the noble flow of line. The figure of Mary, who, with her yellow kerchief, resembled the wife of a London citizen, was the cause of special offence.