Room 7: The Late Landscapes

“Scotland is like a wet pebble, with the colours brought out by the rain.”
Millais

Millais’s affection for the Highlands of Perthshire was most brilliantly expressed in a series of twenty-one large-scale landscapes that he painted outdoors from 1870 to 1892. Twelve are displayed here, the largest ever gathering. He would spend autumns in leased accommodation near Dunkeld and Birnam.

The landscapes he painted there represent a kind of respite from the demands of art and society in London, the same kind of escape that hunting and fishing throughout Scotland would also provide. The results are works that access the picturesque traditions of landscape and the English examples of Constable and Turner, only to reject them through level tones, broad expanses, rushing perspective, a bleak beauty usually absent of history and, in many cases, of human presence. For Millais, autumn was a distinctive time, particularly vivid and teeming with life. These paintings represent new approaches to landscape: through poetic references, novel compositions, celebrations of autumnal scenery and light, and unresolved narratives.

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John Everett Millais
The Sound of Many Waters, 1876
Oil on canvas
The National Trust for Scotland, Fyvie Castle

The resounding title comes from Cardinal Newman’s The Dream of Gerontius. Millais painted this broad and rocky expanse of the River Braan instead of the nearby more picturesque waterfall by the Rumbling Brig. He worked in rain and snow from a temporary hut on the bank. In this mature work he effectively conveyed the features of volcanic rock without the meticulousness of Pre-Raphaelitism. The result is a masterpiece of observation and large-scale ambition.

“Rumbling Brig, November 9th 1876
Dearest Mary,
I fear that, after all, I shall have to give my work up and finish it next year, as there is nothing but snow over all, and I have a cold as well, which makes it positively dangerous to paint out in such weather as this. However, we will see what tomorrow brings. It is dreadfully dull here when there is nothing to do. I have been in my hut this morning, and I hoped a blink of sun would thaw sufficiently the snow on the foreground rocks to enable me to get on, but the storm is on again, and it is simply ridiculous trying to work, as everything is hidden with a white sheet…
Your affectionate father,
JE Millais”

Letter from Millais to his daughter Mary, written near Dunkeld, Perthshire, during the painting of The Sound of Many Waters

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John Everett Millais
Scotch Firs: ‘The silence that is in the lonely woods.’ 1873
Oil on canvas
Lent from a private collection

By invoking the Romantic poet Wordsworth in the subtitle, Millais sought to transform an image of fir trees, underbrush, and a view of Birnam Hill in the background into a meditation on solitude. Such late landscapes are merely suggestive of literary references, not illustrative as in Pre-Raphaelite works. Despite the poet’s ideal of silence and loneliness, meditation and stillness, the picture is remarkably active: flicks of brushwork lead one’s eyes continuously about the surface.

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John Everett Millais
‘The tower of strength which stood / Four-square to all the winds that blew’ 1878-9
Oil on canvas
Lent by the Geoffroy Richard Everett Millais Collection

Millais travelled north from Perth after the death of his second son George, staying at Dhivach cottage outside Drumnadrochit. There he produced this painting as an expiation of his grief. The title is taken from Tennyson’s ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’ and, through the stump-like form of Loch Ness’s ruined Urquhart Castle, he conveys a sense of necessary human resilience in the face of personal tragedy.

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John Everett Millais
Christmas Eve 1887
Oil on canvas
Lent from the private collection of the late Sir Paul Getty KBE

This picture was painted from Murthly Castle, the seat of Sir Archibald Douglas Stewart, 8th Baronet of Murthly who annually rented Birnam Hall, a large lodge in the garden of the castle, to the Millais family. The tower in the painting dates from the fifteenth century. There is a stillness to the picture, but a sense of human presence is none the less conveyed in the snow: cart grooves, human footprints and possibly the tracks of a dog.

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John Everett Millais
‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind’ 1892
Oil on canvas
Lent by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, gift of Mr Moss Davis, 1933

This wintry picture, its title taken from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, was inspired by a scene Millais witnessed on Corsey Hill in the Kinnoull Woods. A young woman nurses her child in the buffeting wind. A collie lifts its muzzle to the sky and howls. The man in the distance has abandoned his family, making this one of the artist’s rare paintings dealing with contemporary social ills, a theme more frequently encountered in his drawings.

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John Everett Millais
Lingering Autumn ‘No spring, nor summer hath such grace/As I have seen in one autumnal face.’ 1890
Oil on canvas
Lent by National Museums Liverpool, Lady Lever Art Gallery

While evocations of autumn in art traditionally connote melancholy and decline, the sentiment in the John Donne quotation in the title is celebratory. In the painting Millais contrasts this vision of gracefully aging beauty with the youthfulness of the child, posed by Effie Stewart, a Perthshire ploughman’s daughter, as a reminder of the continued vitality of nature in autumn. He painted it looking south from the Murthly mill stream, with the glittering river Tay in the background.