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John Everett Millais |
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John Everett Millais,
William Michael Rossetti and the Bird's Nest William’s drawings are far more numerous and varied than Pre-Raphaelite commentators have cared to discover or admit. They are significant because they show that the connoisseur critic was, in his early days at least, also a practising artist. By undertaking a range of drawings that gave him insight into the technical and emotional challenges of creative art, as well as developing his expertise as a connoisseur, William intuitively fulfilled the qualifications Hogarth thought essential for successful art-criticism. Moreover, all his artworks showed his devotion to the fundamental creed of Pre-Raphaelitism - to confront the natural world ‘with earnest scrutiny of visible facts, and an earnest endeavour to present them veraciously and exactly’. Artistic practice as well as his crucial position within the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood made William, throughout his career as an interpreter of modern art, a critic with a difference and not merely a pontificating theorist. About thirty of William’s drawings survive, insightful, delicate, observant, humorous. All are informed with that radical realism practised by Millais during the early days of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Visual evidence of the youthful friendship between William and Millais has never been published before although, conspicuously, it is a pencil head of Millais which is William’s finest surviving portrait. On 6 February 1845, aged fifteen, William left childhood behind for ever when he took up what he thought was temporary employment at the Excise Office in London. In fact, with various senior promotions, it became a career in the Inland Revenue which was to last until his retirement in 1894. Long days of unremitting routine for William as a teenager meant little time for creative work of any sort. However, as soon as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood came into existence in autumn 1848, Gabriel insisted William should join as one of the original seven P.R.B.s. It was a daring rescue from the daily bureaucracies of government office where he found no ‘genuine comradeship of mind’ to the exciting evening liberation of a place among artists. In his turn, William was highly efficient, well-read, well-informed and an asset to the Brotherhood. William’s day-job may have lacked glamour but his Italianate good looks and undoubted personal presence kept him in demand as a model for Pre-Raphaelite pictures. Between 1849-50 he sat twice to Holman Hunt, for Rienzi and for A Converted British Family, for the figure of the angel in Gabriel’s Ecce Ancilla Domini!, and for the doomed head of Lorenzo in Millais’s Keatsian and quintessentially Pre-Raphaelite picture Lorenzo and Isabella. As his contribution, William publicised Pre-Raphaelite artists and their innovative new principles in popular articles he wrote for the Spectator and the Critic.
But as well as depicting the natural world ‘stamen by stamen’, in the late 1840s and early 1850s, Dante Gabriel and William Rossetti’s widening circle of friends, first in the Cyclographic sketching club, and then in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, were all enthusiastically making their own and each other’s likenesses. William had a fair enough opinion of his portrait sketches to frame four of them together. One in the quartet is a pen and ink portrait of the young Millais, poignantly placed adjacent to a profile head of William’s father, Gabriele Rossetti. Totally concealing his father’s eyes beneath a peaked cap, William caught the sense of isolation of the nearly blind. The economic simplicity of line in the head of Millais makes a telling contrast with the withdrawn old man. Millais seems to face the future buoyantly, head on. In a single, conjoined line, William encapsulates Millais’s clarity of vision while in the same motion he accurately defines Millais’s characteristic Roman nose. With a few contrasting vigorous strokes William suggests the unruly curls that, at just twenty, accentuated Millais’s extreme youth.
Three years later, Millais reiterated the pose but reversed sitter and artist when he drew William in October 1852. Millais’s portrait evokes a smooth man of the world in suave, confident pen and wash strokes. He shows William already mature (and prematurely balding) at only twenty-three years old. Half a century later William told Frederic Stephens, his old friend, fellow Pre-Raphaelite and companion in art criticism, ‘I don’t think it very successful, either as a likeness or otherwise’. Millais gives us the external William, a man about town, doing, coping, and, above all earning to support a whole raft of Rossettis, as his father’s ability to do so plunged. Since 1850, William had been art-critic of the Spectator. The salary was substantial, £50 per year (something like £3,200 today) almost half William’s annual salary at the Inland Revenue, approximately £110 in 1850. It wasn’t just about money, although it made William ‘almost […] a capitalist’ among the rest of his Pre-Raphaelite Brothers. Only Millais made more than £160 per year and ‘most of the others, much less or hardly anything’. In his early twenties, William was not only a promising young clerk at the Inland Revenue but, with an energy and versatility reminiscent of the double life of Anthony Trollope, was also establishing a second career as a critic. When he could, William continued to oblige the full-time
Pre-Raphaelite artists, modelling for his brother, for Ford Madox
Brown - and once more for Millais, for the male hands in his picture
The Order of Release
(1852-3). Millais knew the extent of the favour he was asking
when he wrote on 22 February 1853: (William worked a five-and-a-half day week, including Saturdays, at the Inland Revenue.) The two most financially viable Pre-Raphaelite Brothers (at this stage) continued to examine each other’s features. Perhaps the best of William’s portrait heads is a speaking likeness of the young Millais, in profile looking left, showing off to full advantage his sculpted, high cheekbones and aquiline nose. The young man’s clear complexion is delicately expressed in subtle, crosshatched shading which contrasts with the rampant curls of his bohemian coiffeur. The eye beneath its feathery eyebrow is the observant eye of an artist. William has captured this young man’s double appeal, a male ‘stunner’, his face almost feminine but not effeminate. ‘His face came nearer to the type which we term angelic than perhaps any other male visage that I have seen’, thought William. Millais was not quite twenty-four, William a few months his junior, when he described the marvellous boy. Apart from the face, the rest of the portrait is loosely sketched; large expanses of white merely indicate Millais’s high winged collar and the lapels of his fashionable jacket.
William inscribed the portrait, ‘To Thomas Woolner’, added his own initials ‘WMR’ entwined in a careful monogram, and the date ‘12 April, 1853’. This was ‘the day fixed for the grand meeting of Woolner’s friends, when each is to make a drawing to be sent to him in Australia’, Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote to Emma Madox Brown. The hour appointed for the drawing party was midday exactly. The brothers were due to breakfast at Millais’s at eight and then ‘go somewhere into the country for the sketching’ before rounding off the day with an evening of conviviality. Gabriel’s portrait sketch of William, now in the National Portrait Gallery, was drawn on the same occasion. Gabriel told Bell Scott that William had sketched ‘the whole lot of us in his own striking style’, commenting accurately when he sent the results of the sketching party out to Woolner, that ‘some of William’s sketches are very rich’, although only the one of Millais (above) has been traced.
The final direct artistic link between William and Millais was a highly effective copy William made of Millais’s etching The Young Mother, published in 1857. This was one of only 13 plates Millais etched in his career, in spite of being one of the most sought-after and productive of all the illustrators of the 1860s, creating designs for over 270 illustrations between 1854 and 1869. Inspired, as ever, by Millais’s early creed for visual precision, William’s copy is faithful in the finest detail to Millais’s model.
For more than a quarter of a century, from his appointment to the Spectator in 1850 until 1878, William produced nearly 400 art ‘critiques’ for English and American periodicals. From his earliest beginnings he was a thoughtful and honest reviewer, studying both poetry and works of art long and intently, always making notes as he read or on gallery visits. William’s rapt attention to detail was paralleled by the way Pre-Raphaelite artists looked at the natural world ‘without eyelids.’ This approach, based on close observation of pictures and first-hand examination of texts, gave him confidence in his own taste and opinions even as a very young man. He won and deserved the admiration of contemporaries such as Thomas Woolner, George du Maurier, John Ruskin and John Brett. William’s critical impersonality was not, however, bland. He wrote with attitude, but not with cruel destructiveness. All reviewers bring personal history, if not prejudice, to their targets and although William consistently aimed at ‘unbiassed opinion’, he confessed to some only human ‘smoothing down of edges’ when evaluating works by friends and ‘a little tartness’ when reviewing those outside his charmed circle. George du Maurier warmly commended Rossetti’s successful impartiality as well as his insight as a critic: ‘You mention William Rossetti’s critique in Fraser of this month. Have you read it? I think he’s the only critic who’s not a hack and whose opinion[s] are genuine & felt - and strange to say he appears to me to have wonderfully little party feeling considering his bringing up & associations. His article on Millais’ Moonlight is enough to stamp him as a genuine critic to my mind.’ Invited by the publisher Macmillan, William put together a collection of his best art reviews to form Fine Art, Chiefly Contemporary in 1867, taking the opportunity to re-print his seminal article Præraphaelitism, which had first appeared in the Spectator in 1851, as well as including radical discussions of unfashionable British Sculpture (1861) and esoteric Japanese Woodcuts (1863). William declared his manifesto as an art critic in a frank and personal preface, freely admitting how his opinions on art had developed and changed over the sixteen years he had been in the field. To stand still would have meant stagnation, and he explained how his priorities in looking at a picture had shifted from subject matter to style. His taste for ‘directly decorative art’ had grown with maturity as he developed an eye for the innovatory aesthetics of Whistlerian art that was to lead to the new cri de coeur, ‘art for art’s sake’, among artists and cognoscenti. Re-issuing his reviews of the Royal Academy summer shows 1861-64 allowed William scope to expound his views on contemporary art - always his area of special interest and, therefore, one half of his title. Using these shows as a springboard, he produced essays on the current state of British art and the direction it should take. By the late 1860s, William’s aesthetic position prioritised style above subject matter, particularly in the field of visual art, although style was not his chief criterion in assessing literature. He attributed advances in style by modern British artists to ‘the stern and true discipline of Præraphaelitism’, believing that ‘if you have good style, you have simply and entirely good art’. A picture’s content was secondary to its ‘style’ because ‘good style will make a good picture out of the most ignoble subject’. However, he advocated that modern artists should choose modern subjects, either drawn from life as they saw it or from history as they interpreted it because ‘life still is life all the world over, and all the centuries through’. The artist’s range of possible subject is ‘as endless as the range of life and of society’ and the artist’s job was to give his subjects ‘real palpitating life’, not historic pomposity or laboured didacticism. William always made valuable and illuminating generalisations but was often most perceptive and idiosyncratic when discussing individual works of art. As he said of Ford Madox Brown, ‘strong men have strong idiosyncrasies.’ His strengths lay in his visual memory, the result of looking long and deep at pictures, such as Millais’s The Woodman’s Daughter (1851), set ‘deep in summer’ when ‘the air throbs with penetrative light and warmth’. The best pictures inspired him to empathetic interpretation. He sighed with Millais’s Mariana in the Moated Grange (1851) where ‘throughout the long day’s watching, the moist leaves have drifted in, and lie unheeded on her table; a mouse, fearless of disturbance, has come out from “behind the mouldering wainscot”; and sunset lights up in the casement the emblem of the broken lily’. Mariana’s bed ‘waits to receive her but not to comfort her, after one more day gone in the heartsick vain longing’. Comparing his two Pre-Raphaelite ‘Brothers’, Hunt and Millais, William acutely traced Hunt’s reflective art to its origins in thought and intellectual effort, while noting that the more naturally creative Millais worked out of flair and intuition. When Millais moved away from pictures that ‘told a story’, towards suggestive, mood subjects such as Autumn Leaves (1856), William immediately hailed his imaginative achievement. He continually praised ‘the unapproachable’ Millais for his ‘power, brilliancy, suavity, ease and “go”’ but was not afraid to take him to task for the increasing carelessness (even ‘sloshiness’ that Millais had so despised in his younger days) that came with success - ‘look at the mere smear of formless umber which stands for the boy’s hand’ in A Dream of the Past, Sir Isumbras at the Ford (1857). As the years went on, William lamented that Millais produced too many glib commercial canvases, ‘knocking off picture after picture of little girls and boys’. William pronounced ‘no little dissatisfaction’ with the ‘rather cheap outcome’ of the 100th Royal Academy Exhibition in 1868 and complained about the ‘ever-recurrent hanging controversy.’ Whenever he could praise artists, he did so, both friends and unknowns, great contemporary names like Watts, Landseer and Leighton, as well as striving amateurs. That year he declared Millais to be ‘in pure, unforced, untrammelled possession of his mastery’ in the portrait of his three daughters, Sisters. As the myths inevitably gathered around the history
of the short-lived Pre-Raphaelite movement, William corrected
misconceptions about its true origins, firmly but tactfully maintaining
the tri-partite balance between its three iconic, founding artists.
‘Some writers have said that Rossetti was the originator of As all things grew sadder to him by the turn of the century, following the deaths of brother, sisters, mother, wife - William lamented old friends, P.R.B.s and associates, artists, poets, writers, critics, editors, publishers, dealers, collectors, and political activists, as each one pre-deceased him, none regretted more than ‘my early and beloved intimate’ - Millais. But it was the old friendship of their joint youth he regretted rather than the metamorphosis of Millais into fashionable artist. When they had been Pre-Raphaelite Brothers together, William had imbibed an almost moral taste for Millais’s first principles of precise observation. What he longed for was another bird’s nest. |
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