And this same stringent painter of character commands, as few others, the soft light brush of a painter of children. No one since Reynolds and Gainsborough has painted with so much character as Millais the dazzling freshness of English youth; the energetic pose of a boy’s head or the beauty of an English girl—a thing which stands in the world alone: the soft, glancing, silken locks, rippling to a blonde cendrée, pale, delicate little faces, pouting little mouths, and great, shining blue, dreamy, childish eyes. Sometimes they stand in rose-coloured dresses embroidered with silver in front of a deep green curtain, or sit reading upon a dark red carpet flowered with black. At other times they are arrayed like the little Infantas of Velasquez, and play with a spaniel like the Doge’s children of Titian, or hold out with both hands an apron full of flowers, which Millais paints with a high degree of finish. A spray of pale red roses, chrysanthemums, or lilies stands near. One must be a great master of characterisation to paint conscious, dignified, and earnest feminine beauty like that of Mrs. Bischoffsheim, and at the same time that fragrant perfume of the fresh and dewy spring of youth which breathes from Millais’ pictures of children.

PHILLIP.THE LETTER-WRITER, SEVILLE.

Millais is one of those men in the history of nineteenth-century painting who are as forcible and healthy as they are many-sided. I do not know one who could have developed so swiftly from a style of the most minute exactness to one of the most powerful breadth; not one who could have united such poetry of conception with such an enormous knowledge of human beings; not one who could have been so like Proteus in variety—at one moment charming, at another dreamy, at another entirely positive. In their firm structure and largeness of manner his landscapes sometimes recall Théodore Rousseau. And now the pre-Raphaelite is just a little evident in an excess of detail. He paints every blade of grass and every small plant, though there is at the same time a largeness in the midst of this scrupulous exactitude. He does not merely see the isolated fact through a magnifying lens, but has eyes that are sensitive to the poetry of the whole, and in spite of all study of detail he sometimes reaches a total effect which is altogether impressionist. His picture “Chill October” has an airy life, a grey, vibrating atmosphere, such as only John Constable painted elsewhere.

Such a concrete study of nature as was made by the pre-Raphaelites of necessity led at last to entirely realistic pictures from modern life. In their biblical and poetic pictures they had started from the conviction that new life-blood could only be poured into the old conventional types, which had gradually become meaningless by tactfully drawing the models for them from popular life. They believed, as the masters of Florence and Bruges had done before them, that there could be no good painting without strict dependence on the model; that it was of the utmost importance to give a poetic or legendary figure the stamp of nature, the strong savour of individuality. All their creations are based upon the elements of portrait painting, even when they illustrate remote scenes from the New Testament or from mediæval poetry. And these elements at last led them altogether to give up transposing such figures into an alien milieu, and simply to paint what was offered by their own surroundings. In this way they reached the goal which was arrived at in French painting through Courbet and Ribot. It is due in the first place to the pre-Raphaelites that the well-meant and moderately painted genre picture of the old style, which, with its wealth of pathetic stories, was once a prime source of supposed artistic pleasure, was finally vanquished in England, and made way for earnest and vigorous painting,—painting which sought to make its effect by purely artistic means, and proudly declined attempt to conceal intrinsic weakness in “interesting” subject drawn from external sources. As early as 1855 Millais exhibited a picture in the Royal Academy which Ruskin called a truly great work containing the elements of immortality—“The Rescue.” It represented a fireman who has carried three children from a burning house and laid them in the arms of their parents. Narrative purport was entirely renounced. The fireman was treated without sentimentality, and in a way that suggested the cool fulfilment of a duty, and the agitation of the parents was also rendered without any dash of melodrama. Then there followed that masterpiece of exquisite and soft colouring, tender and moving expression, and infinite grace, “The Gambler’s Wife,” sadly taking up the cards which have brought her misery upon her. In 1874 was painted “The North-West Passage,” a sort of modern symbol of the forceful, enterprising English people who have populated and subdued half the world from their little island kingdom. “There is a passage to the Pole, and England will find it—must find it.” These are more or less the words spoken by Trelawney, the old friend and comrade of Byron in Greece. With a chart before him he is brooding over the plan of the North-West Passage, and upon his own outstretched hand, which would fain hold the future in its grasp, the hand of a youthful woman is soothingly laid, as she sits at his feet reading to him the narrative of the last voyage of discovery. The figure of the seaman with his white beard has a strong, sinewy life, and the broad daylight streams through the room, filled with charts and atlases. The sea and clear, bright sky gleam through the open window. It is a powerful and moving picture, one of those modern creations in which the ideas of the nineteenth century are concentrated with simplicity and a renunciation of all hollow emphasis.

PHILLIP.SPANISH SISTERS.

A few pictures of modern life which have nothing in common with the older genre painting may even be found among the works of the devotionalist Holman Hunt. “Awakened Conscience,” according to the explanation of the painter, tells the story of a young woman seduced by a cruel and light-minded man, and kept in a luxurious little country-house. They are together. Seated at the piano he is playing the old melody “Oft in the Stilly Night,” and the strains of the song recall to the frail maiden her youth, and the years of purity and innocence. Thus even Hunt has not overcome the moralising tendencies of Hogarth, though his taste is more discreet and delicate. He has struck deeper chords of thought than the English public had heard before. And in particular the painting is not a mere substratum for the story; it has become the principal thing, and the story subsidiary. In another picture, “May Morning on Magdalen Tower,” he renounced all deeper purpose altogether, and merely painted a number of Oxford dons and students, who, in accordance with the old custom, usher in the May with a hymn from the college tower.

But the most remarkable work of this description has been executed by Madox Brown, the English Menzel, who has not merely reconstructed the environment of past ages with the accuracy of an eye-witness, but has looked upon the drama of modern life as an attentive observer. His first picture, “The Last of England,” was executed in the June of 1852, at a time when emigration to America began to take serious proportions. A married couple, humble, middle-class people, are sitting on the deck of a ship. The man, in his thick cloth overcoat, with a soft felt hat on his head, a pale face, and sunken eyes with dark rings underneath, casts one more look upon his native-land, which vanishes in the hazy distance, as he thinks bitterly of lost hopes and vain struggles. But the young wife, in a light-coloured cloak and a pretty round bonnet with wide strings, gazes before her with gentle resignation, from underneath a great umbrella protecting her from the boisterous sea-wind.

R. ANSDELL.   A SETTER AND GROUSE.

In “Work,” begun at the same period, and finished, after various interruptions, in 1865, he has produced the first modern picture of artisans after Courbet’s “Stone-breakers.” The painter, who was then living in Hampstead, where extensive cuttings were being made for the laying down of gas-pipes, daily saw the English artisan at labour in all his thick-set strength. This gave him the theme for his picture. In bright daylight on a glaring summer afternoon artisans are digging a trench for gas-pipes in a busy street. Women and poor children are standing near. Even the older genre artists had painted men in their working blouses, but only joking and making merry, never at work. Like stage-managers who are sure of their public, they always set the same troop of puppets dancing. Madox Brown’s artisans are robust and raw-boned figures; where the older artists affected to be witty with their genre painting, Madox Brown painted straightforwardly, without humour and without making his figures beautiful. The composition of his pictures is just as plain. No one poses, no one makes impassioned gestures, no one thinks of grouping himself with his neighbour in fine flowing lines. It is pleasant to think that this powerful symbol of work has passed by presentation into the possession of one of the greatest manufacturing towns in England, into the gallery of Manchester.