“Millais”
Tate Britain, London.
September 26, 2007-January 13, 2008
Tate Britain has mounted some splendid exhibitions during the past couple of years, including the Holbein exhibition in autumn 2006, the Hogarth show in winter 2007, and the Turner watercolors curated by David Hockney from June 2007 to February 2008. These shows have all been admirably thorough, effectively hung, and well explained for visitors. Recently, in the same seven-room basement gallery that housed the Holbein and Hogarth, the Tate offered, until January 2008, a widely representative sampling of paintings by John Everett Millais (1829–1896). The exhibition goes on from London to Amsterdam and Tokyo.
Millais was the best-known member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which he formed together with William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti when the three were students at the Royal Academy. Today it is hard to believe how blasphemous these young painters’ rejection of Raphael’s static perfection seemed to their contemporaries. No less eminent a person than Charles Dickens complained of Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents, exhibited at the R.A. in 1850, that the young Jesus came across as “a hideous wry-necked blubbering boy.” The brilliance of the painting, pace Dickens, is the freshness with which Millais pictured Jesus as an awkward boy with the red hair of a young Ashkenazi Jew.
Today there is nothing unorthodox about the notion that by the sixteenth century much of the freshness had departed from Italian Renaissance painting, that when something has fully