In many respects a total contrast to Leighton was the successor to his great office, John Everett Millais. I was fortunate in his acquaintance at the Garrick Club when I was elected as a member fifty-six years ago. Millais loved the club and cared but little for any other.
Although looked upon as a Jerseyman, he chanced to be born at Southampton, and I remember being told by a man—who was for many years prompter under our management—that he had seen Millais, as a very small boy, sprawling upon the stage of the Southampton theatre and drawing with a piece of chalk things that had form and shape.
I don't know when he first came into fame and astounded the world by the wonderful children of his brush and brain. Beautiful things teem through the memory. I see the little creature, on a church bench, listening to The First Sermon; a work of infinite pathos called The Blind Girl; Walter Raleigh on the shingly shore, clutching his knees and absorbing the yarns of an old sea-dog; the two nuns digging a grave for a comrade in The Vale of Rest; those well-known masterpieces, The Princes in the Tower, The Black Brunswicker and The Order of Release. And then the gallery of portraits—Tennyson, Newman, Gladstone, Bright and the unfinished Disraeli. Others also crowd upon remembrance: those of my comrades, Henry Irving and John Hare—not, in my judgment, among his best examples,—of Arthur Sullivan—one of the very best,—and the great surgeon, Henry Thompson, which, like the striking portrait of Mr. Wertheimer by Sargent, as you look at it, seems that it might speak. I see also the beautiful portraits of Mrs. Langtry and Mrs. Jopling Rowe, but, alas! not one of my wife. I offered Millais a large sum to paint one of her for me, but he declined, for two reasons; he said that he could not bring himself to accept money from a brother artist, and that he should fail, as the face would change while his eyes turned even for a moment to the palette. One word to recall his masterly landscapes, Chill October, and, if I remember their attractive titles, The Fringe of the Moor and The Sound of Many Waters. Never in any man's work was refinement more closely merged with art. I see a fine photograph of him daily, if in London, with an autograph in the corner, briefly accepting an invitation to dinner in these words: "I'm your man." I looked down upon his handsome features, as he was fading away from life, and kissed him.
Poynter
Edward Poynter succeeded to the President's chair, which had only been occupied by Millais briefly. It was during his reign that I had the honour at the Royal Academy Banquet to respond for the Drama: the toast had only once been proposed before, when Irving replied. It was a difficult task, and the greatness of the audience impressed me with my own littleness. Wisely, I am sure, I limited myself to five minutes only, and venture to give an extract from what I said:
"I was not unmindful that the proposal of this toast at that great banquet was a mark of respect to the stage which could only make the stage the more respect itself. I could not speak in that room—surrounded as I was by the rulers in that fairyland—without some attempt, however faint, to say that my admiration of the beautiful art, so splendidly illustrated year by year upon those walls, was as true as my love for the living pictures we players tried to paint. Our pictures, alas! died early, for the greatest actor's work must be a passing triumph; it was not cut in marble, nor did it live on canvas, but could only owe its fame to written records and traditions. Vast wealth might keep for us, and for the ages yet to come, the undying splendour of a Reynolds or a Millais, but no sum could buy one single echo of the voice of Sarah Siddons. The drama was the most winning, fascinating, alluring thing that ever was conceived for the recreation of mankind. As England could claim to be the parent of the drama in Europe, so could she claim to be the mother of the greatest dramatist the world had owned, whose mighty genius left all art in debt that never could be paid, and whose works alone would make the stage eternal."
The pictures by Poynter which live clearest in my memory are his Catapult and Visit to Æsculapius. Concerning the latter work a story "went the rounds"—possibly as untrue as many another—that two beautiful sisters were as flattered by the eminent painter's wish to make drawings of their heads as they were horrified to find them reproduced upon bodies of well-known models in the nude.
Poynter painted a portrait of himself for the Uffizi Gallery as Millais did. There is an admirable copy of this portrait in his beloved Garrick.
I was never really intimate with Alma Tadema, although I knew him for many years, beginning with the time when he lived in Regent's Park. Owing to an explosion of gunpowder on the canal there, if my memory is accurate, his house was wrecked and he went to live in the Grove End Road, in a house formerly occupied by Tissot, a French artist, who had quite a vogue for a time. Tadema translated the house into "a thing of beauty and a joy for ever," where he entertained a great artistic company, worthy to be surrounded by the Roses of Heliogabalus.
I owe the following painful and remarkable story to my friend Aston Webb, lately President of the Royal Academy; it was told to him and others by Tadema. A young woman, an American, the daughter of parents of wealth and position, was the cause of great anxiety to her father and mother, to her intimate friends, and to her doctor, on the score of health, which puzzled all concerned, and became a mystery which no one seemed able to unravel. At last the doctor was driven to advise a year's absence from home and its surroundings by a trip to Europe, to be spent where and how the girl might wish, in the companionship of a female friend—she had no sisters, and the parents could not leave their own country at the time.