 Millais at Tate Britain |
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Friday, October 05 2007 @ 11:03 AM BST
Author: Fred. Views: 242
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 John Everett Millais (1829�1896) was the most famous, in his lifetime, of all the Pre-Raphaelites, and the only one to be knighted.
He is perhaps best known for his paintings 'The boyhood of Raleigh' and 'Bubbles' or, if you are an art buff, 'Ophelia' in which model Lizzie Siddall nearly froze to death in a tin bath heated by oil lamps that had a habit of going out.
Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were the best-known members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded in 1848. They rejected all art since the Renaissance in favour of paintings made before Raphael, in a quest for 'truth to nature'. Millais soon grew out of this 'style', however, and only the first room of this major Tate Britain exhibition is devoted to his Pre-Raph work. Millais was a prodigy - the first major painting in this show is the impressive 'Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru', painted and accepted by the Royal Academy when he was just 16. His first real Pre-Raph picture 'Isabella', was painted just two years later. It's hard to believe now that his 'Christ in the House of His Parents' created such a fuss at the time for appearing too realistic!
 The second room is labelled 'Romance and Modern Genre' and contains some of his most beautiful paintings: 'The blind girl' with rainbow glows with pure luminosity (see the detail shown here), but then he starts to get in a rut with a series of 'tragic woman with wounded/hunted soldier' pictures, such as 'The Black Brunswicker'. And from here on sentimentality seems to take over. Also in this room is Millais' portrait of John Ruskin, the man whose wife, Effie, he stole for his own. As well as the paintings, the exhibition is full of pen and ink drawings and sketches such as the hilarious 'Awful Protection Against Midges' showing Millais smoking a pipe with a bag over his head whilst painting with his brother in the Trossachs.
In room 3, he loosens up, painting in an Aesthetic style. 'Autumn leaves' is the most gorgeous painting, not only of the leaves and twilight, but of young beautiful girls approaching adolescence, a subject reprised in 'Spring' and one few would dare to paint today. Room 4 contains some of his biggest paintings, 'The North-West Passage' for example is enormous. In room 5, we come to his 'fancy' paintings of which 'Bubbles', bought by Lord Lever and appropriated for advertising, and 'Cherry Ripe' are well known. The idea was to dress one of his many kids in the style of Gainsborough, and to include ephemeral emblems, such as flowers, fruit and bubbles suggesting mortality. His formal portraits in room 6 cover everyone from Lillie Langtry to Gladstone and Disraeli and were the source of his great wealth. He spent the money on trips to Scotland, where he painted the brooding landscapes seen in the final room of this major exhibition, which runs at Tate Britain until 13 January 2008.
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Images:
Details from:
'Ophelia' 1851-2, Oil on canvas
support: 762 x 1118 mm frame: 1105 x 1458 x 145 mm
Painting � Tate
'The Blind Girl' (1854-1856), Oil on canvas
808 x 534 mm
Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. Presented by the Rt Hon William Kendrick, 1892
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