John Everett Millais: A Biography

Contemporary Review, Dec, 1998 by Richard Whittington-Egan

G. H. Fleming. Constable. [pounds]20.00. 272 pages. ISBN 0-094-78560-0.

Comparing Mr. Fleming's book with the only previous biography of Millais - the massive double-decker by his fourth son which stands on my shelf besides Mr. Fleming's two previous books on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, one cannot but feel that he has made a wise decision. After more than thirty-five years' arduous beavering, he has, he informs us, enough in his files to have created a thousand-pageplus 'chronicle biography'.

However the author has very sensibly elected to be 'selective rather than exhaustive (and exhausting)'. He sees before his scriptor's eye the cautionary remark once made by that great jazz trumpet player, Miles Davis: 'I always listen to what I can leave out.' Of what Mr. Fleming's ear has told him to put in, three-quarters is appearing between hard covers for the first time; a great deal of it corrective of the hagiographic errors and omissions dictated by the filial bias of its doughty - or 'doubty' - predecessor.

Since Millais was a man with an acute ear for the opinions of others, and, indeed, permitted the views of critics to shape his art and career, Mr. Fleming has most usefully drawn widely from the friable source of the contemporary reviews of his work. The chronicle of events discloses that Millais was born under a lucky star, As importantly, he was born of extraordinarily caring parents, who, recognising their infant prodigy for what he was, adapted every method and adopted every sacrifice to promote his artistic genius. The resultant glittering prizes included his becoming the youngest ever Associate of the Royal Academy, one of the youngest full Academicians, the honour of being the first painter to have an hereditary title bestowed upon him, the ultimate possession of enormous wealth, and, the final coronal, the Presidency of the Royal Academy.

For a time, however, the cherished child of the Academy risked the loss of all that he had so seemingly effortlessly achieved. That was when, with his fellows William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, he embraced that Pre-Raphaelite form which proclaimed itself no more and no less than sincerity, miniscule truth to nature, and owing nought else to foreign or ancient artists.

The apogee of the Wunderkind's vilification came in 1850 with his exhibition of The Carpenter's Shop. Not even Ruskin, whose critical patronage had made the earlier Pre-Raphaelite offerings acceptable, could salvage this latter-day artistic disaster. It was Millais himself who spotted, and took, the commercial turn of the road that led on to add immense fortune to his already immense fame.

No life is without its Priestleyan dangerous corner, and Millais' came in 1853. That was when he and Ruskin's wife, Effie, fell in love. Ruskin behaved throughout the entire affair with gentlemanly dignity. This did not prevent Millais from developing a positively paranoid hatred towards the man whom he had wronged and to whom he owed so much professionally. Effie and Millais married in 1855. Sadly, it was not to be the great lifelong romance that its beginning seemed to proclaim, By 1867 the couple had reached an irreversible turning point in their relationship. Almost certainly, the breakdown was a sexual one.

Effie, Mr. Fleming suggests, was in this regard like Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure. On a purely practical level, throughout two score and one years of marriage, Millais, under his wife's canny Scots guidance began, as William Gaunt in his delightful The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy expresses it, 'to pull away from the perilous shoals round the islands of dream towards the harbour of success.'

By 1867 he could boast an income of [pounds]100 a day from water-colour copies alone, and was well on the way to becoming the portraitist of fashion's day. With increasing wealth, he gradually degenerated into a rather sorry pursuer of 'county' life, country-house-non-culture; riding to hounds, slaughtering more birds, beasts and fish than any other artist of his age.

In 1886, a series of three articles, 'The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: A Fight for Art', by Holman Hunt appeared in Contemporary Review and Millais wrote to his old comrade in arms that they were 'quite charming and most interesting, albeit very sad reading.'

Back in 1879, Millais had built himself a splendid mansion, No. 2 Palace Gate, opposite Kensington Gardens. In 1896, as he lay there stricken by cancer of the throat, a letter arrived from Queen Victoria: was there anything she could do for him? Yes, she could receive his wife at Court. To this she immediately consented. John Millais could now rest in peace - in St. Paul's Cathedral.

RICHARD WHITTINGTON-EGAN