The People's Hero: Millais's The rescue and the image of the fireman in nineteenth-century art and media: J.E. Millais's celebrated painting can be best understood in the rich context of Victorian depictions of firefighters, who first became popular heroes in the nineteenth century

Apollo, Dec, 2004 by John A. Walker

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Nine years later, on 10 January, 1880, The Graphic published an engraving by Charles Green (Fig. 9) depicting a bearded fireman wearing a brass helmet and holding a hose nozzle. (The 'hose shot' was later to become extremely popular with documentary photographers.) Light from an unseen fire illuminates his face and burning embers float around his head. A writer in the journal The Fireman was most impressed and claimed that the man's features were 'animated with an expression of unmistakable intelligence and heroic resolve which suggests he is prepared for any conceivable act of intrepid daring or self-sacrifice. A spirit of sympathetic humanity permeates every line of that face.' (9) Such images, the writer thought, could encourage beholders to accomplish noble deeds.

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Green's print was one of a series entitled 'Heads of the People'. These inspired Vincent van Gogh, who lived in London for periods in the 1870s and was an avid reader of British illustrated magazines, to produce similar portraits of peasants, miners, postmen, soldiers and doctors. If Van Gogh had known a fireman, no doubt he would have painted his portrait too.

Funerals, unfortunately, are common motifs in firefighting iconography. Engravings depicting them first appeared in nineteenth-century magazines. For example, one showing the funeral cortege of Thomas George Ashford appeared in The Illustrated London News on 23 December 1882 (Fig. 10). Ashford, a thirty-five year-old assistant officer, was killed by falling masonry during a blaze that destroyed the Alhambra Theatre on 8 December. Captain Shaw and about 270 firemen were among the mourners in the funeral procession that ended in Highgate Cemetery.

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Freestanding sculpture is a difficult medium in which to represent firefighting scenes because the setting can only be suggested. However, there is at least one example: The fireman, a small group sculpture depicting a bearded fireman rescuing a naked baby and a swooning girl (Fig. 12). Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1874, it is by George Halse (1826-95), a minor neo-classical sculptor, illustrator, poet, novelist and author of a book about the methods of sculpture. (10) He was a self-taught, spare-time artist who supported himself by working for thirty-nine years in a bank. Halse's fireman steps forward with his left leg and turns his head to his right as if conscious of the fire from which he has emerged with the two victims. An axe lies discarded at his feet. The fireman's alert, determined face has a particularly fine profile and with his crested helmet he resembles the Roman soldiers Halse also enjoyed depicting. To accompany a photograph of his sculpture Halse composed a poem that praised the valour of 'nameless men'. It is clear from the sculpture and poem that his aim was to represent a modern everyday hero exemplifying the ideals of bravery, manliness and nobility.

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Charles Vigor, an academic painter active in London between 1881 and 1902, who produced portraits and figurative subjects of a sentimental kind, also created a rescue scene. His painting Saved, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1892 (Fig. 11), was probably inspired by earlier works such as The rescue and an American print by Louis Maurer entitled Prompt to the rescue (1858). Unlike Millais's fireman, Vigor's is shown from the front and he cradles only one child--a pretty, young, unconscious female--in his arms, upon whom he gazes with concern. He emerges from a doorway emitting flames and black smoke, and wears a brass helmet of the type introduced by Shaw in the 1860s. The painting was reproduced on posters and postcards and became known in countries as far apart as Russia and Australia.