Part 14

For the second time within a few months the Royal Academy has lost its chief, while English Painting is deprived of its most popular representative, and contemporary English Art of one who was long its most vigorous and most varied personality. Born at Southampton in 1829, the ‘son of John William Millais, Esquire, by Mary, daughter of Richard Evemy, Esquire’--as the official biographies relate--Millais was really the descendant of a Jersey family of long standing; but in character, personal and professional, he was typically English. It is partly by reason of the fact that, as a man and as an artist, Millais summed up some, perhaps, of the defects, many certainly of the great qualities, of our English race, that his popularity amongst all personal associates, and amongst the spectators of his decisive, strenuous, and eager work, was won so early, and has been so firmly held.

The man himself, during forty years or thereabouts of active adult life--the artist during forty years of scarcely relaxed endeavour--has been in thought, in conduct, in taste, and in production, pre-eminently healthy. Millais, in the generation and a half of his active life--for he began young--had seen fashions good and bad, foolish and reasonable, rise and pass away; but, save by the influences of his quite early days, the days of the Pre-Raphaelites, he has been practically unaffected. He has developed in the direction proper to himself. As time has passed, he and his sympathies have broadened and modified, and if we miss in much of the later work the intense and concentrated poetry of the earlier, that later work has qualities of its own that do something to compensate. The man himself, too--sportsman, man of the world, excellent comrade, hearty and sincere good fellow--has been essentially greater in his more recent than in his earlier times; for the temptations of a success, brilliant and uninterrupted, did him, as a man at least, little harm. Simple and generous he was--by all the records of his fellows--when he was at ‘Mr. Sass’s Academy’ fifty years ago. Simple and generous--generous especially in thought and judgment as well as in action--he remained, when in the late winter of the present year he was appointed to the visible headship of the profession to which he had given so much of the energy of his life.

Sir John Millais was only nine years old when he gained his first medal at the Society of Arts--Mozart himself scarcely came before the public in more tender years, as an executant upon the limited keyboard of his day--and when he was seventeen, ‘Jack’ Millais was already an exhibitor at the Academy. He was only twenty when his ‘Isabella,’ from the poem of Keats, disclosed a new talent, almost a new order of talent; at the least, a personality that had to be reckoned with--an influence that had to be either accepted or fought against. Yet more marked by an artistic individuality which was, in part, a return to older conceptions and views than those of his day, were the ‘Carpenter’s Shop,’ ‘Mariana in the Moated Grange,’ the ‘Huguenot,’ and ‘Ophelia.’ These, or most of them, are typical Pre-Raphaelite pictures--the offspring of the tacit rebellion of a whole group of men, only one of whom, Mr. Holman Hunt, remains to give effect in his later life to the principles enunciated in youth. Dante Gabriel Rossetti--Pre-Raphaelite to the end, though of course with certain modifications--was another of those men; but years have passed since he went from us. The group was completed by others never as celebrated, nor, as the world judges, so successful. They painted their pictures; they made their illustrations; they wrote as well as drew, in the quaint publication called _The Germ_, which the lapse of time and the fad of the collector have since made rare and valuable. Truth, rather than convention, was the aim of their practice; but they were not peculiar in that,--all youth, if it is earnest at all, is earnest for truth, or earnest rather for that particular side of truth which happens just then to have been revealed, and of which it exaggerates the value. Much has been written about the Pre-Raphaelite ‘movement’ and its supreme importance--as if it were a great religious Reformation and a French Revolution rolled into one. In History it is destined to be remembered because it was a phase through which two or three men of genius passed--a something, moreover, that for the moment welded them together. It will not be recollected, because at a later time mere imitative weaklings, by the dozen, made feeble fight under what they professed to be its banner.

The interest, then, for sensible people, in Millais’s early pictures, lies, not in the fact that they were Pre-Raphaelite, but in the fact that they showed, many of them, an intensity of vision, a profundity of poetic feeling, which is the property of gifted and of eager youth. The passionate, constant devotion--the devotion of a minute which lasts, you feel, for a lifetime; the ‘moment eternal,’ as the great poet puts it--of the Puritan Maiden and of the Cavalier she helps, is the interest of the ‘Concealed Royalist.’ The burning love-affair of the ‘Huguenot’ is the interest of a canvas on which, before the days when the aesthete had invented ‘intensity’ of attitude, Millais had determined that his lovers should be intense, instead of sentimental. Millais was in those years occupied very much with the presentation, never of strictly sensuous enjoyment (Rossetti’s field, rather than his), but of violent emotion, and uncontrolled, almost uncontrollable, impulse. His people felt keenly, but with the elevation of poetic natures, or of a poetic mood. And Millais painted them when their blood ran high. He chose the incident that seemed to him the most dramatic in all their story. He painted them on the crest of the wave--at the moment of crisis.

This, however, like the more naïve Pre-Raphaelitism of a yet earlier time, was but a phase--remarkable now chiefly because it has been so absolutely outlived; nay, because so much of the view of life taken subsequently by its author has, dominating it, a spirit so opposed to this one. But the transition was not rapid: the ‘Autumn Leaves’ of 1856, and the ‘Vale of Rest’ of 1860, have, at least, the poetic quality to the full, though with no violence of emotion. Rather, they are suggestive and reticent; weird and extraordinarily expressive: in the one there is depicted the wistfulness of childhood, in the other the melancholy resignation of a nun to whom ‘rest’ means brooding on a Past more eventful and more poignant than the occupation of her present day.

Notwithstanding his later technical development, nothing that Sir John Millais has painted will be remembered more definitely and firmly than these; and it is noteworthy that they are among the first pictures in which he relied in great measure upon landscape to express or suggest the sentiment which it was the picture’s business to convey. ‘Spring Flowers’ of 1860 was in a lighter and gayer vein, if it is, as we believe, the picture known originally as ‘Apple Blossom’--girls lounging in an orchard under the loaded and whitened boughs. ‘My First Sermon,’ in 1863, was more purely popular than anything we have named. It dealt with childhood almost in the spirit of Édouard Frère, but with its author’s singular realism of execution. ‘Vanessa,’ in 1869, marked Millais as occupied increasingly with technical problems--with the attainment of an almost novel boldness of effect. It is, like so many pieces of his middle and later middle time, brilliant in colour and brush-work. No one now thinks, we suppose, of claiming it as dramatic--that is, of connecting it especially with the character of the lady who came off second-best in the affections of Swift.

Very soon after the exhibition of ‘Vanessa,’ Millais, who had already sought impressiveness in landscape background, turned to pure landscape as a theme sufficient for the exercise of his art. He gave us then ‘Chill October,’ the October of the north and of the lowlands, with the wind passing over water, and the reeds and scanty foliage bent aside by its breath. The picture excited interest. It was visibly forcible. The conception of the scene, too, was unusual and, of course, unconventional; but in some later landscape work, Millais may have been at once nearer to Nature and nearer to the attainment of a perfected art. ‘New Laid Eggs,’ in 1873, with naïveté of expression and dexterity of handling, but with a rusticity not very convincing, was a ‘taking’ picture of happy, healthy, self-confident girlhood. Its importance, in the volume of its author’s work, was quite eclipsed the following year by the ‘North-West Passage,’ a canvas full of interest almost romantic, yet most direct in its record of character--the main figure being, indeed, a portrait of that Trevelyan who is associated in most men’s minds with the career of Shelley. He it was who in Sir John Millais’s picture posed as the sturdy sailor whose imagination engages him in a remote and unknown voyage. When, many years after it had been painted, the ‘North-West Passage’ was seen again in the Millais Exhibition, at the Fine Art Society’s or at the Grosvenor Gallery, it was felt that at the moment of its execution the painter had reached the summit of his real artistic greatness, the masculine and potent hand here best executing that which had been prompted by a mind at its most vigorous. ‘A Jersey Lily,’ in 1878, was a tribute to the then girlish beauty of Mrs. Langtry, who at about the same period was recorded by Mr. Watts with exquisite simplicity. Again, just as in his diploma picture it had pleased Millais to invoke the name of Velasquez, and to perform a feat such as that to which Velasquez was most wont to address himself, so, in another canvas, in one sense more important--that of the three Miss Armstrongs playing whist with a dummy--it pleased him to follow visibly in the steps of Sir Joshua Reynolds--recalling his composition; the portrait group of the three Ladies Waldegrave being the one with which he on this occasion made it his business to vie. In 1879 Sir John was able to exhibit one of the masterpieces of portraiture--that record or idealisation of Mr. Gladstone of which the nobility and charm were instantly recognised--a canvas which of itself would be sufficient to prove that the faculty of poetic vision never finally deserted an artist who had seemed of late to concentrate his energy rather on dexterous execution than on the expression of profound feeling or elevated mood. The ‘Mr. Bright,’ which pretty closely followed the ‘Gladstone,’ was comparatively unsuccessful. And the illness of the sitter and the consequent incompleteness of his presentation on Millais’s canvas, made yet more disappointing the portrait of Lord Beaconsfield which hung upon the walls of the Academy in 1881. Next year, however, came the ‘Cardinal Newman,’ to atone for all that had been amiss--again a poetic vision, a worthy rising to the exigencies of a great theme, a performance at once decisive and tender, energetic, yet exquisitely suave.

(_Standard_, 14th August 1896.)

BURNE-JONES

Unexpectedly and suddenly, from an attack of _angina pectoris_, following upon the pest of influenza, Sir Edward Burne-Jones died yesterday morning. He was sixty-five years old, and he looked worn for his age--a man of delicate appearance, and certainly of great sensitiveness; yet, as it had seemed already, of much staying power,--a ‘creaking gate,’ as his friends thought, not so very regretfully, since destined, in all probability, to ‘hang long.’ But now his work and life have been arrested; the laborious days which he had lived for forty years of manhood are for ever over, and the wan face of the untiring craftsman, which bent eagerly over his task, and brightened with quick sensibility in the relaxation of the social hour, is for ever still. ‘Finis’ is written to the volume of achievement of one of the greater practitioners in what we may call the second generation of the English Pre-Raphaelites.

Of the first Pre-Raphaelites--of those of the first generation--more than one changed his ways, his work, his whole conception of Art, obviously, as time went on, and the most illustrious of them all--Millais--was far enough removed from a Pre-Raphaelite in the end. But of that distinguished and untiring practitioner of the second generation, whose hold, of late years at least, upon the English and to some extent upon the French public has become phenomenal, though it will not be constant, it is certainly to be noted that although there was, at different times, an unequal capacity, there was at no time visible change in the direction of his tastes or in the method of his work. Of the human figure Burne-Jones was not at the first an excellent, and was never, at any time, an absolutely faultless draughtsman. Yet the poetry of his figure-drawing, the almost feminine tenderness with which he followed the lines of dainty human movement, the dreamy grace that was in the place of strength, the elegant diffuseness, so to say, which was characteristic of his style--never even by accident tense and terse--these things are noticeable in his earlier water-colours and in the very latest of his performances in this year’s New Gallery. It was as a water-colour painter that he first began to be known. A pupil of Rossetti, as far as he was a pupil of any one, Burne-Jones was from the beginning romantic, and he was affluent in colour.

But what, it may be asked, are the especial characteristics of Sir Edward Burne-Jones’s art, as it has been revealed not only in the designs for painted glass, mosaic, tapestry, in numberless pages decorated with beautiful ornament--such as the Morris translation of Virgil, and later, the great Chaucer--but likewise in the series of large pictures, the adequate display of which was, so to say, one of the _raisons d’être_ of the old Grosvenor Gallery? He had indeed extraordinary individuality. He was amenable to influence, for all that; and the influence he felt the most--that of his true fellows--was exercised by the Italians of the earlier Renaissance: a period scarcely primitive, scarcely accomplished. Those early Italians, though engaging, were not really great draughtsmen of the human figure--not great draughtsmen in the sense of the Greek sculptors, or Michael Angelo, or Raphael, or Ingres, or Leighton, or Bouguereau. Sir Edward Burne-Jones, lacking the peculiar education which fitted the temperament and brought out the qualities of the men we have named last of all, not unnaturally sympathised with those in whom intention counted sometimes for more than execution. But it must not be thought that because the ever-inventive artist did not possess the Academic qualities, he was not, therefore, in certain respects, very remarkable in draughtsmanship. He drew with the ease of conversation; and, though never a master of accurate gesture--seldom dramatic in the representation of the particular hour or scene--he was a master of quaint and simple, and sometimes of elaborate, grace; and for the untiring record of the particular type of maidenhood, seen best perhaps in the ‘Golden Staircase,’ or in ‘Venus’s Looking-Glass,’ he stands alone. We name those pictures rather than, for instance, the ‘Days of Creation,’ or any of his various ‘Seasons,’ because in them he is at his happiest--his girls, though in the work of the suave decorator they are never essentially various, can be radiant as well as doleful. His men have plenty of wistfulness, but they have rarely energy, strength, decision. They are even, in a measure, sexless. And of childhood, Burne-Jones has never been an inspired, or even, it would seem, a particularly interested chronicler.

Of course, it must be remembered that Burne-Jones is judged unjustly when judged by the rules of even the least narrow realism. He painted, not the world of our own day, or of any day--least of all the Kensington in which he lived, and slept, and had his studio--but a world he had imagined and created; a world his conception of which was fed, no doubt, by the earlier and graver of mid-Italian art. Imagination, now stimulated by legend, now supported by classic lore, and now the product of the brooding of an isolated mind--that is really the genesis, the _raison d’être_, the Alpha and the Omega of his art. Burne-Jones had, at his best, and especially in his middle period--the days of the ‘Chant d’Amour,’ with its fitly welcomed splendours of crimson and blue and golden brown--a wonderful gift of colour; and, even where the draughtsmanship of the human figure left something to be wished for, he was a marvellous, a loving, and a patient draughtsman of flower and of herb. The backgrounds of some of his inventions, in landscape and the architecture of towns, were of strange and mystic quaintness. Sometimes, in these, he recalled almost the spirit, the mystery, almost the charm, of the backgrounds of the prints by Albert Dürer. The great Dürer!--well, that is saying much. But we have left to the last what was perhaps Burne-Jones’s most essential characteristic, certainly his greatest accomplishment. We mean his gift of composition of line, his power of precisely and perfectly filling, and never overcrowding, the space it was his business to occupy. His composition of light and shade was less remarkable. He was a master of agreeable outline, of flowing and spontaneous tracery. But if it is not his imagination which is to keep his memory green, in the minds of the students of Art--and we doubt whether, with all his very individual merits, it really is--then it is that in which, in all our generation, and perhaps in all our English School, he may be accounted to have most possessed--the humbler faculty of patterning, of weaving faultless webs of subtle line over the surface, large or small, which was devoted to the exposition of whatever chanced to be his theme.

(_Standard_, 18th June 1898.)

BOSBOOM AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES

The English _cognoscenti_ of the modern type have now for some time recognised that in Dutch Art there is more than one great period that has to be reckoned with--that the great Seventeenth Century does not exhaust the achievements of this people. It may not be quite true to say of Dutch painting, as of French sculpture, that the traditions have been invariably preserved, and that there has been little break in the school; for the last century in Holland was a barren one--just as barren there as in France and England it was brilliant. The revival has been for later generations, and of those who did most to accomplish it some are yet living, in an old age not so very advanced, and others are lately dead. A history of this revival would be a great and worthy subject: it may yet, one hopes, be undertaken by some one writer qualified to treat it. Such a writer could not possibly be a person who had lived wholly within its influence. He would have to bring with him something better and wiser than the ungoverned admirations of the modern studio. A knowledge of the Past must be his. Meanwhile, we receive, and experience a certain satisfaction in receiving, even that fragmentary contribution to the subject which is made in the volume called _Dutch Painters of the Nineteenth Century_. Max Rooses--the keeper of the Musée Plantin-Moretus at Antwerp--furnishes a general introduction, which is readable and fairly comprehensive, if not particularly critical. And many writers, whose collaboration is of necessity destructive of unity of idea, but whose individual opportunities of personal knowledge give the book something it might yet have lacked had it been written by one serious and capable critic, contribute biographical notes, authentic and amiable. The painters have been caressed, not analysed. That is exactly what the least instructed and least studious portion of the public is supposed to like, in the ‘text’ of its big Christmas picture-books--which, of course, is why that text is written so seldom by the serious professional writers who, if they chose to do it at all, could do it best.

Only a dozen painters are represented in Mr. Max Rooses’ volume, and the selection of this dozen is extremely arbitrary, or would be if it were not, as we understand, the intention of the publishers to follow up the present with at least one other volume. Two women figure amongst the twelve. Miss Jacoba van der Sande Backhuysen, the aged flower-painter, who died three years ago, and then was seventy-one, deserved probably to be included. She is included. Some of her work is of freedom and vigour, if some also tends to be precise and impersonal. You cannot find in every generation or in every land a Fantin-Latour or a Francis James; and the flowers of Jacoba van der Sande Backhuysen are generally welcome. But the introduction of Henriette Ronner, a popular and quite delightful lady, with the narrow speciality of painting cats, was surely scarcely merited. As for the men, the choice is hardly less arbitrary. Israels, of course, is in his place, with his grey record of the homely and the sad; and, though Alma-Tadema is a naturalised Englishman, it is not surprising that the Dutch should be reluctant to forget what at least was his origin. But if Alma-Tadema is to be included, why is Van Haanen--a Dutchman still, probably, and the truest and subtlest of all living painters of Venetian life and character--why is Van Haanen to be left out? We receive gladly what is given us of Bisschop, Weissenbruch, and Gabriel. But the omission of such gifted Dutchmen as Mauve and Mesdag and Artz and Mathieu Maris--even in a first volume--is memorable. Further, the omission of the great name of Jacob Maris--certainly one of the most potent of all contemporary masters--would be fatal to any pretensions that the volume might make to completeness, or, if the phrase may be accorded us, to even a temporary finality. But if it becomes the duty of any qualified observer to note important omissions, compelling further instalments of the history, it must be satisfactory to him to chronicle such inclusions as those we have already cited as welcome and reasonable, and it is nothing less than a pleasure to find, not only contained, but placed in the forefront of the volume, the name and work of Johannes Bosboom. To Bosboom, and his right of place there, we will devote our remaining comments, and partly because the large English public is still strangely deficient in the appreciation of his work.