Sir John Millais by Frederick Wedmore — Read

For the second time within a few months the Royal Academy has lost its chief, while English Painting is deprived of its most popular representative, and contemporary English Art of one who was long its most vigorous and most varied personality. Born at Southampton in 1829, the ‘son of John William Millais, Esquire, by Mary, daughter of Richard Evemy, Esquire' -- as the official biographies relate -- Millais was really the descendant of a Jersey family of long standing; but in character, personal and professional, he was typically English. It is partly by reason of the fact that, as a man and as an artist, Millais summed up some, perhaps, of the defects, many certainly of the great qualities, of our English race, that his popularity amongst all personal associates, and amongst the spectators of his decisive, strenuous, and eager work, was won so early, and has been so firmly held.

The man himself, during forty years or thereabouts of active adult life -- the artist during forty years of scarcely relaxed endeavour -- has been in thought, in conduct, in taste, and in production, pre-eminently healthy. Millais, in the generation and a half of his active life -- for he began young -- had seen fashions good and bad, foolish and reasonable, rise and pass away; but, save by the influences of his quite early days, the days of the Pre-Raphaelites, he has been practically unaffected. He has developed in the direction proper to himself. As time has passed, he and his sympathies have broadened and modified, and if we miss in much of the later work the intense and concentrated poetry of the earlier, that later work has qualities of its own that do something to compensate. The man himself, too -- sportsman, man of the world, excellent comrade, hearty and sincere good fellow -- has been essentially greater in his more recent than in his earlier times; for the temptations of a success, brilliant and uninterrupted, did him, as a man at least, little harm. Simple and generous he was -- by all the records of his fellows -- when he was at ‘Mr. Sass's Academy' fifty years ago. Simple and generous -- generous especially in thought and judgment as well as in action -- he remained, when in the late winter of the present year he was appointed to the visible headship of the profession to which he had given so much of the energy of his life.