Art review: John Everett Millais
Tate Britain, London, SW1
26/9/07 – 13/1/08
Rating: ***** (out of 5)
Review by: Alexa Williamson
The name John Everett Millais (1829-96) does not instantly come to mind – as does Pablo Picasso or Claude Monet – when one says ‘name a brilliant artist’. However, after seeing this recent exhibition, I can fairly say he is one of Western Europe’s most accomplished 19th century artists.
Millais was the founder of the short-lived, but beautiful and highly popular, Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1846-53), which is noted for rebelling against the British Academy’s standards of rigid and realistic representation of people and landscapes in painting. Instead, the Pre-Raphaelites depicted things in a deliberately naïve and ephemeral manner – distorting shape and proportion – and using beautiful strong colours to reveal the sentiment of their works. Other important Pre-Raphaelites include Dante Gabriel Rossetti (perhaps the most famous of the three) and William Holman Hunt.
This exhibit is an excellent tribute to Millais’ work because it brings together the best examples from each period and style of painting throughout his life. And, each painting demonstrates that Millais could produce consistently strong, beautiful and ingenious masterpieces – whether he was painting a very realistic, large and beautiful portrait of a lady, depicting a Shakespearian play in his earlier, more whimsical pieces, or tying in the name and sentiments of a William Wordsworth or Alfred Tennyson poem with a real-life landscape.
The excellent Pre-Raphaelite works on display include Ophelia (1851) , which was inspired, obviously, by Shakespeare’s Hamlet and was modelled by Rossetti’s wife Elizabeth Siddal; Mariana (1850-51) , based on the Tennyson poem about a woman who isolates herself in a castle and pines for her lover; and Ferdinand lured by Ariel (1849-50), based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In keeping with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, each painting is based on a literary fantasy, represented in bright, beautiful colours and a dreamy haze is added to each scene with blunt brush strokes.
Following on from his Pre-Raphaelite period, Millais created a series of grand and romantic paintings of people, landscapes and historic scenes between the mid-1850s through the 1890s – all still inter-related by their realistic, yet ideally beautiful, portrayal of each subject. Historic and romantic pictures Peace Concluded (1856) in which an injured soldier returns home from the Crimean War to his disinterested wife and The Proscribed Royalist, 1651 (1852-53), which portrays a Puritan woman trying to help her Royalist lover escape Cromwell. The Royalist lover’s hiding in a tree is meant to mirror Charles II’s hiding in an oak tree during the Battle of Worcester.
Some of Millais’ best portraits include Leisure Hours (1864), two cherubic little girls donned in velvet; Hearts are Trumps (1872), ), three society ladies playing cards; and The Marchioness of Huntly (1870), in her wedding gown (which is also noted as Millais’ largest painting and reminiscent of both Joshua Reynolds and James McNeill Whistler’s styles). Meanwhile, notable landscapes include Scotch Firs (1873 – title also inspired by a Wordsworth poem), The Tower of Strength (1878) – the Urquhart Castle ruins on the banks of Loch Ness and Christmas Eve (a picture of Birnam Hall) – all done on his many retreats to the Scottish Highlands.
One landscape that varies from all the others, however, is Dew Drenched Furze (1889-90) in which he uses a ‘misty’ effect in the same way that William Turner does in some of his landscapes such as Brunnen from the Banks of Lucerne.
The quality of Millais’ work – painting style, subject matter and interpretation of such – are consistently strong throughout his career. Due to this, the summary of his life’s work, shown in this exhibit is breathtaking – a well-done show not to have been missed.
Further information:
Millais exhibit room guide (Tate Britain website)
Shows many of the pictures that were on display
John Everett Millais’ biography (Wikipedia)
Other beautiful Millais paintings worth checking out:
Isabella (1848-49)
Depicting the tale of doomed lovers Isabella and Lorenzo from Boccaccio’s Decameron.
The Eve of St Agnes (1863)
Cherry Ripe – 1879
Portrait of a little girl – one of his most syndicated
Effie Millais – 1873
Did you know, she was originally the wife of Scottish writer John Ruskin, but she and Millais fell so much in love that she had her marriage annulled, married him and they went on to have eight children? She was also such an inspiring model; she featured in a large number of his paintings.
Louise Jopling (1879)
The Little Speedwell’s Darling Blue (1891-92)
[...] in a slightly skewed and highly personal manner. And, the Tate Britain, in a similar way to the Millais exhibit that preceded this, have created both a sizable and knowledgeable experience that lets one [...]