Room 4: The Grand Tradition

Around 1870 Millais developed a manner of working that was particular to him and which endured until the end of his career. Although his subject pictures continued to focus on the predicaments of ordinary individuals in historical circumstances, they can also be seen as a reaction against his earlier work in terms of their size and robustness of execution. As well as expressing the persona of the artist, gestural brushwork also communicated his identification with an Old Master tradition in painting epitomised by Titian, Velázquez and Rembrandt.

The synthesis between past and present Millais aimed for was undertaken with the aim of embracing a wide audience, not only connoisseurs sensitive to issues of style and influence, but also non-specialists eager for drama, characterisation and narrative. Millais’s great achievement with his late subject pictures was in involving the viewer in the interpretation of his subjects. This approach not only allowed him to offer complex readings of historical and religious subjects, but also encouraged the production of ‘problem’ pictures like ‘Speak! Speak!’ which have no basis in a specific history or text.

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John Everett Millais
The Boyhood of Raleigh 1869-70
Oil on canvas
Tate. Presented by Amy, Lady Tate in memory of Sir Henry Tate 1900
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One of Millais’s best-known paintings, it depicts a young Sir Walter Raleigh, the most celebrated explorer of the Elizabethan age, sitting mesmerised by a sailor whose tales of adventure, together with the toy boat and exotic birds at the periphery of the image, allude to the boy’s future destiny on the high seas. Millais’s eldest son Everett sat for the figure of Raleigh on the left, and his second son George for the other boy.

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John Everett Millais
The North-West Passage 1874
Oil on canvas
Tate. Presented by Sir Henry Tate 1894
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The Northwest Passage was the name given to the treacherous sea route round the North American continent to the Pacific, a challenge that had thwarted explorers from Henry Hudson to, more recently, John Franklin. This work was intended to elicit patriotic sentiment through the image of a fiery ancient mariner who, fist clenched, shows his confidence in English nautical discovery. He and his daughter are surrounded by the mementos of a life on the seas.

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“The North-West Passage, exhibited at the Academy in the
spring of 1874, was perhaps the most popular of all Millais’
paintings at the time, not only for its intrinsic merit, but
as an expression more eloquent than words of the manly
enterprise of the nation and the common desire that to
England should fall the honour of laying bare the hidden
mystery of the North. ‘It might be done, and England
ought to do it’: this was the stirring legend that marked
the subject of the picture; and its treatment by the artist
lent a dignity and a pathos to the words that undoubtedly
added to their force.”

Millais’s son John Guille Millais in his The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, 1899

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John Everett Millais
St Stephen 1894-5
Oil on canvas
Tate. Presented by Sir Henry Tate 1894
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This is Millais’s last picture to feature a landscape background painted outdoors, and another novel treatment of a religious story – two aspects consistent in his practice since Pre-Raphaelitism. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, was stoned to death. His sainthood is signalled by a halo, and the spectral figures in the right background are disciples waiting to bury the body. The setting was painted from a disused stone quarry on Kinnoull Hill, near Perth.

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John Everett Millais
‘Speak! Speak!’ 1894-5
Oil on canvas
Tate. Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest 1895
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This was Millais’s last large-scale narrative picture and a work that encapsulates his long-term interest in the supernatural. It is an imaginary subject set in an indeterminate period but possibly the Roman era. A man starts up in his bed. On the candle-lit table by his side lie the letters of his lost love whom he suddenly beholds as an apparition standing at the foot of his bed in her bridal attire.

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John Everett Millais
Esther 1863-5
Oil on canvas
Lent from the Collection of Robert and Ann Wiggins, USA

Esther, the Jewish Queen of ancient Susa stands at a crossroads, as the penalty for entering her husband King Ahasuerus’s hall without being summoned was death, regardless of rank or relation. The king, unaware of her faith, had decreed the death of all Jews. Esther had decided to risk exposure by interceding. Colour, tone, costume and a continuing evolution of a new idea of female beauty and power come together in this historical picture.

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John Everett Millais
Jephthah 1867
Oil on canvas
Lent by the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff

In a cautionary tale from the Book of Judges, Jephthah led the Israelites against Ammon and to ensure victory vowed to sacrifice the first creature he encountered on his return. His daughter first greeted him and so was sentenced to death. Through the use of details like the vortex pattern of the fur on Jephthah’s cloak, weapons of war and disposition of the figures, Millais creates a scene of heightened emotion and psychological turmoil.

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John Everett Millais
The Princes in the Tower 1878
Oil on canvas
Royal Holloway College, University of London, Egham

Millais’s interpretation of this famous event in British history represents the sons of Edward IV, the princes Edward and Richard, anxiously anticipating the arrival of the assassins sent by the usurper Richard III. In presenting these attractive, apprehensive and long-haired boys against a staircase, Millais was aiming at historical accuracy, alluding to the discovery by workmen in 1674 of the skeletons of two children under a staircase in the Tower of London.