Messrs. Millais and Hunt

Abstract

Messrs. Millais and Hunt Théophile Gautier and Marie-Hélène Girard (bio) Translator’s Preface This text by Théophile Gautier (1811–1872) was originally published on 31 May 1855 as a chronicle in the Moniteur universel, the official newspaper of the Second Empire, where Gautier had arrived as an art and drama critic shortly before the Universal Exhibition. Gautier’s essay on the British Pre-Raphaelites “Messrs. Millais and Hunt,” translated in English here for the first time, was part of a series of fifty-two articles in which he reviewed the art exhibition held at the same time in the temporary Palais des Beaux-Arts on the avenue Montaigne. (The articles were later collected in his Les Beaux-Arts en Europe.) While artists from all over the world had reputedly been invited, only the major European countries were substantially represented. British artists—more than three hundred of whom were present—seized this opportunity to assert themselves as an articulate and powerful school, fully capable of challenging French hegemony in the field of art. They did meet with undisputable success in Paris. But while artists such as Landseer or Mulready gained a European reputation, the most successful and most talked about artists were arguably the Pre-Raphaelite painters then almost unknown in Paris. They attracted the attention of most of the approximately eighty reviewers who emphasized their strangeness and often their English “eccentricity.” Pace Delacroix’s severe criticism of Gautier’s prose in his diary entry of 17 June 1855, this article reveals a sharp and subtle understanding of the Pre-Raphaelites’ originality. Gautier is very receptive to their revolutionary use of [End Page 549] pure colors and accurately highlights what distinguishes their relationship to the past from that of the German Nazarenes. Gautier successfully conveys to his readers what makes the realistic, if not hyperrealist, manner of the Pre-Raphaelites so unique and in a way so modern. Though he never refers to Millais or Hunt as Pre-Raphaelites in this text, he would characterize them as members of “the British Pre-Raphaelite sect” in a later article of the series (14 June 1855). Here Gautier praises their “naïve” way of painting in conjunction with their nostalgia for the late Middle Ages, and contrasts their formal and controlled realism—or more accurately, naturalism—with Courbet’s more radical and unmitigated representation of the real, which Gautier condemns for an often brutal, vulgar, and mannered ugliness. Messrs. Millais and Hunt Whereas Mulready is a direct descendant of Hogarth and Wilkie, a true English painter of the old school displaying all the qualities and the faults of his lineage, except for an idiosyncratic quality that distinguishes him from his ancestors, Mr. Millais has no affiliation to the past or present British school. He goes off on his own and completely isolates himself in his own originality as if up in an ivory tower, and there, under the gothic-structured vault of the rotunda he uses as his studio, under a ray of light filtering through a peephole, he keeps working, as if from olden days onward Time had not yet rotated its secular hourglass more than four or five times; using Memling’s genuine simplicity, Van Eyck’s stained-glass colors, and Holbein’s minute realism. Like certain archaic German painters, Mr. Millais seems capable of throwing Raphael out of Paradise as a mundane Mannerist. Mr. Millais’s three paintings are certainly the most unusual in the Universal Exhibition, and it is impossible, even for the most distracted visitor, not to stop in front of them.—In our time, wavering between so many theories, painters have looked for the “naïve in the arts,” especially on the other bank of Rhine, but no one has taken this system to its ultimate conclusion. What distinguishes Mr. Millais’s works from comparable attempts is that he does not merely reproduce more or less successfully old paintings in facsimile, but rather studies nature with the soul and the eyes of an artist of the fifteenth century. Nothing is further from Overbeck’s style, although Overbeck tried to go back in time too, and to strip himself of modern science as...