Light, Descending

by Octavia Randolph

  Hunt and he had no evidence either way, but Gabriel certainly was the likeliest suspect. Someone had leaked what those three initials stood for––and the critics had gone mad after them for their presumption in “damning Raphael,” the painter of the “great” ‘Transfiguration’. Their “hieroglyphics” revealed, the Illustrated London News now accused them of “the reproduction of saints squeezed out perfectly flat.”

  “And no one even mentioned the ‘PRB’ painted on our work last year; it’s as if they hadn’t even seen it,” Hunt said. The trajectory seemed to point from obscurity to notoriety and now back to obscurity.

  Their experiment in publishing a journal of literature and art––their best chance for a public manifesto––had just failed. The Germ had seen only four numbers, with a print run, and sales, decreasing from extremely modest to non-existent. They had filled it with sonnets, reviews, and philosophical essays, supplied not only by the seven Brothers, but by guests. Ford Madox Brown wrote on painting, and Christina Rossetti contributed her poetry, as did Coventry Patmore and William Bell Scott. They had boxes of unsold copies. No one wanted their wisdom at a shilling a copy.

  Millais had worked like a demon over the winter, with the result that three of his new canvases had been accepted for exhibition in the year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Hesitant to return to overtly religious themes he had taken literature as his guide. ‘Mariana’ was accompanied in the exhibition catalogue by a few lines from Tennyson’s poem. The painting featured a young woman in rich blue medieval garb rising from her needlework in weariness, vainly awaiting her lover. He had the satisfaction of entering it in the show already sold to a dealer for £150.

  His second painting was also sold by the time it was hung on the Academy’s walls. In the ‘The Return of the Dove to the Ark’ two of the young daughters-in-law of Noah are seen cradling the returning dove who has brought them the olive branch.

  It was the painting which came into the exhibition unsold, and remained so for months afterwards, that changed his life.

  He took a Coventry Patmore poem, ‘The Woodman’s Daughter’ as his subject. His painting showed two children, of five or six years of age. The squire’s son, in brilliant red, extends his arm with a handful of strawberries to little Maud, the simply dressed woodman’s daughter on his father’s estate. The woodman is at work hewing a tree behind the children, oblivious to the act. Patmore’s poem went on to tell of how, growing up, the two fell in hopeless and forbidden love. Maud bears their child, drowns it, and is driven mad by the grief of her circumstances. Millais’ painting, with the locked stare of the children’s eyes and Maud’s cupped hands ready to receive the proffered strawberries, presaged their sad future.

  Hunt too turned to literature, painting ‘Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus’ from Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona.

  The art critic of The Times was quick to respond.

  We cannot censure as amply or as strongly as we desire that strange disorder of the mind or eyes which continues to rage with unabated absurdity among a class of juvenile artists who style themselves Pre-Raphaelite Brethren. Their faith seems to consist in absolute contempt for perspective and the known laws of light and shade, an aversion to beauty in every shape, seeking out every excess of sharpness and deformity...

  “Aversion to beauty?” repeated Millais. “Beauty, and the Truth in beauty, is all I live for!”

  But he threw up his hands. Patmore had been good enough to contribute a poem for their failed effort The Germ. He knew John Ruskin, whose Modern Painters volumes I and II had so impressed the Brotherhood. Would Patmore say a word to Ruskin on their behalf?

  A week later he had the satisfaction of finding on the back page of The Times Ruskin’s long, considered, and not entirely laudatory defence. And then a fortnight later another letter from “the Author of Modern Painters” appeared. Millais held it in his hands and read it slowly aloud to himself, his voice nearly trembling with excitement. The Times reviewer had been scornful, Ruskin wrote, and unnecessarily severe. It is true he had not himself cared for Mr. Millais’ painting of Christ in the carpenter shop exhibited last year, and he felt that one of the young wives in the same artist’s ‘Return of the Dove’ was marked by “dull complacency.” But, he went on

  These Pre-Raphaelites (I cannot compliment them on common sense in choice of a nom de guerre) do not desire nor pretend in any way to imitate antique painting as such. They know very little of ancient paintings who suppose the works of these young artists to resemble them. As far as I can judge of their aim––for, as I said, I do not know the men themselves––the Pre-Raphaelites intend to surrender no advantage which the knowledge or inventions of the present time can afford to their art. They intend to return to the early days in this one point only––that, as far as in them lies, they will draw either what they see, or what they suppose might have been the actual facts of the scene they desire to represent, irrespective of any rules of picture-making; and have chosen their unfortunate though not inaccurate name because all artists did this before Raphael’s time, and after Raphael’s time did not this, but sought to paint fair pictures, rather than represent stern facts, of which the consequence has been that from Raphael’s time to this day historical art has been in acknowledged decadence.

  And

  ...they may, as they gain experience, lay in our England the foundation of a school of art nobler than the world has seen for three hundred years.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Lamp of Life

  Scotland: September 1853

  Effie Ruskin and John Everett Millais had been walking in the swelling foothills of Ben Ledi for over two hours. They had left Brig o’ Turk in the same drizzle which had opened nearly every day since their arrival, and as John Ruskin could not pose in the rain, and his wife did not mind walking in it, Millais proposed the two of them take a walk with the hope he could return to his portrait of her husband in the afternoon.

  The party had left London on the summer solstice and arrived in the Highlands at the beginning of July. John Ruskin had needed a holiday, and Effie was longing for Scotland. It was natural Ruskin would invite his new protégé, so badly in need of rest himself, to come along. The Trossachs region was famed for the rugged beauty of its hills, lochs and streams, and their little group––Effie and John, Everett and his brother William Millais, and John’s new servant, Crawley––had intended no more than a one day’s stopping at tiny Brig o’ Turk. But then Everett––Effie could not call him ‘John’ for confusion with her husband, so she and John both called him by his middle name––happened upon a setting ideal for the portrait old Mr. Ruskin was eager for him to paint of his son. Millais would have him stand upon an outcropping of rock before a whirling torrent of rushing water. The spot, a little further up the glen, was so singularly isolated and lovely, and yet with the convenience of a newly-opened hotel fast by, that the decision was made to stay. Everett had found the perfect setting for John’s portrait, and it must be painted out of doors, with perfect fidelity to nature.

  Although this was to be a rest for Millais, who had nearly exhausted himself in painting these past two years, his painstaking methods meant that his work was necessarily slow, and he wanted to start at once. He sent to Edinburgh for canvas; it arrived not white enough and he sent again. In the meantime he continued painting Effie Ruskin.

  Since they had begun travelling in late June Everett had made scores of little studies of Effie, in sepia ink, or in pencil. Almost as soon as they had got into Scotland they made an excursion to the ruins of Doune Castle. John could not join them. He had twisted his ankle and remained behind at their inn, but Effie and Everett and William wandered amidst the broken walls and heath-filled hall. He sketched her standing, looking out of a glass-less window, and when he brought the sketch back that night John suggested that Everett consider a portrait of her.

  The young painter had already begun one on the trip. It was an oil p
ainting of Effie seated, looking down at the needlework she was working on, her hair adorned with purple foxglove flowers. He presented it to her husband and it was gratefully received. Ruskin wrote to his father to say it was worth at least £50.

  But then, Everett told her, no one could capture her likeness as he felt he could. He knew Thomas Richmond had tried, as had George Watts, and even John. “You are made to look pensive to escape the difficulties of expression and colouration,” Everett said. He saw something more, a truer way to depict the contrast of high cheekbone and narrow nose, the slight tilt of her eyes, the mobility of lips.

  John had been surprised, and then quite flattered, when Millais had asked earlier if she might pose for him. Since John had taken up the Pre-Raphaelites and become their champion, Effie had seen Everett, but not often. She had been with John to make the first call on the Millais household following the letter of thanks which Everett and Holman Hunt had sent him. She met Mrs. Millais and the tall, blond and very lean John Everett.

  “You don’t recall it,” he told her on their next meeting over dinner, “but we have before met. Long ago.” He was smiling so she could not guess if he was teazing.

  “At a party at Ewell Castle,” he prompted. “You were a splendid lady of seventeen, and I but a callow youth of sixteen. You would not dance with me––alas.”

  She did indeed have no remembrance of him. But when earlier this year he had wanted to paint a Scottish subject for entry into the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, he asked John if she might be allowed to sit for him. She was posed as the wife of a prisoner taken at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Her injured soldier husband, wearing the tartan of Gordon, and with his arm in a sling, has just stepped forth from his gaol and has dropped his head upon her shoulder. She carries their little boy in one arm, while with the other holds out to the English gaoler the slip of paper she has brought securing her husband’s freedom. Her expression is stoic, proud, but not insolent. Everett called it ‘The Order of Release’.

  It was not only accepted for the Academy show, it caused a sensation. The crowds were so thick that a protecting cordon was strung before it. Everyone knew she was the heroine of the painting; other than the fact that Everett had changed her auburn locks to dark, it was a perfect likeness. She forgot about the stiff neck she suffered standing for hours in her pose, the weight of the various child models she held, the fact that the man posing as the soldier husband turned out to be in truth a military deserter. It was an homage to the crushed Jacobite Rebellion, a reminder of England’s injustices to her homeland, and she was proud of her role in the success of the painting.

  This morning she and Everett had left Brig o’ Turk walking in drizzle over the tracks hatching the foothills. The rain had thinned to mist and the sky fleetingly brightened upon glistening rock and dripping blue heaths. She wore her ‘wide-awake’––a broad, flat-brimmed felt hat, against the perpetual wet. Everett had his blond curls tucked into his peak-billed hunting cap; with a tartan thrown over his shoulder he looked like a character in one of his own paintings. They came to a streamlet with a sandy bottom; despite the influx of new rain, the water ran clear.

  “Would you like to drink?” he asked. She always walked with her little shallow tin cappie hanging from her waist, and she untied it now and handed it to him.

  He knelt down upon the wet moss and dipped the cappie into the stream. Still on his knees before her he held out the cup. She took it from his fingers and he looked at her as she drank. She lowered it from her lips and to his extended hand. He did not dip it in the stream again, but put it to his own lips and drained it.

  The next day Effie saw the sketch he had made of their walk. Everett drew continually and had made many amusing records of their holiday exploits. This drawing, in sepia ink, showed him kneeling before her. Both their hands touch the cappie, his in offering, hers in receiving. She studied it in silence. The eyes meeting, the hands touching the same proffered object recalled her of a sudden to his ‘Isabella’.

  In the corner was the monogram he used to sign his work, a large curving ‘M’ bisected by a descending ‘J’, with his middle initial E centred in the M. But on this one he had closed the terminals of the M so it looked like a heart, a heart enclosing the E that also began her own name.

  It rained interminably at Brig o’ Turk. From almost the first day the fair weather they hoped for was denied them. The new hotel was comfortable but costly; with so few visitors in the area it must charge what it could for those who came. After a week they moved to the little schoolmaster’s cottage. They were given a small sitting room with two minute closets at one end for bedrooms, furnished with a cot each and little else. Effie hung her clothing on a file of nails in hers, and Everett joked that in his little “snuffbox of a crib” he could open the window, close the door, and shave, all without getting out of bed. John slept on the broad sofa in an alcove of the sitting room.

  If Millais thought the accommodation unusual he did not at first admit this to himself. As there was no actual bedroom in the cottage for the married couple, it was perhaps more decorous and practical for them all to live as brothers and sister, each to their own small beds. The walls were board thin and he could hear Effie moving inside her tiny room, just as he was certain she could hear him. Yet as the weeks became months he could not help but occasionally consider the import of these arrangements, though he strove to drive such thoughts, invasive and unworthy as he found them, from his mind. He did not allow himself to wonder that, five years into their marriage, the Ruskins had as yet no children.

  “Rain again,” said Everett one morning, calling through his closed door as he finished dressing. The rain, moderate overnight, was now a downpour outside his none too tight window; a little pool on the sill needed always to be mopped up.

  “Another day’s work on my index,” responded John from the sitting room, without much regret. Once they had determined to stop in Brig o’ Turk, he had had his father send up the materials needed to extract the huge index for The Stones of Venice. Always an early riser, he had been at work by lamplight.

  “More battledore and shuttlecock,” Effie answered.

  Mornings were the happiest time of the day, the cheery calling out to each other as they all three dressed, the hearty breakfast by the schoolmaster’s wife awaiting them, the expectation––usually dashed––that the day might be fine. To Effie Everett’s presence was almost like that of her younger brother George; he made her laugh. They made up silly names for each other––he called her the Countess, and she dubbed him a Duke. His thinness made him refer to himself as “a specimen of a living paper-knife” and his unruly curls his “cockatoo crop.” He was always clowning, always drawing, and alarmingly accident prone, with the endearing clumsiness of a young giraffe who hasn’t yet mastered its legs. And he was good for John, she saw. John had “taken up” Everett. Once he began looking seriously at the work of the Brotherhood, it was clear that Millais possessed not only superior technical skill, but superior pictorial ability fuelled by a rare imagination. Millais was the genius of the group, and John would spare no effort to foster and guide such genius.

  Everett began his painting of John by painting another of her, sitting on the rocks with her needlework, very near the place he would pose John. It was a small try-out of his ability to capture the intricate folds of the gneiss and the foam of the rapid waters. John even made his own watercolour of a large rock of gneiss, so Everett could see how best it might be painted. By the time the larger, whiter canvas arrived from Edinburgh, the rain had become persistent. When he was at last able to work, his progress was tediously, but they all knew, necessarily, slow. He had blocked in the shape that John would occupy, and spent his first day producing two inches of exquisite foliage near his head.

  Whenever the rain ceased they would make haste to the site, Crawley carrying Everett’s paint box, he his easel, and John the walking stick he was posed with. Everett’s brother William, who rema
ined lodged at the hotel, sometimes painted watercolours nearby, or fished for trout.

  Any day that Everett could paint, Effie sat next him on the rocks, almost back to back, leaning against him to shelter the book in her hands from the wind. She felt her voice grow stronger with the effort of making sure artist and model could hear her. It was Dante’s journey into Hell she read aloud.

  “Ouf! Ah! Got you on that one!”

  Effie and John and the Millais brothers were in the little school-room at the end of the cottage, battledore rackets in hands, whacking the feathered shuttlecock between them. The school room was little more than a converted barn, and the children only came for lessons in the morning. If it was pouring rain outside, as it was now, they could retire here to play and get some exercise.

  Effie had a good eye and had played for years with her siblings, and could more than keep up her end of the game when one of the others flung the feathered shuttlecock her way. But when she tired and sat down to watch, the three men played with a phrenzy. Whether it was because of being cooped-up so much, or their natural competiveness coming out, or the fact they had a spectator in her, she couldn’t guess. Today they lunged and leapt until they panted, cried out challenges, and charged red-faced about the sanded floor.

  “Got you! Got you! You’re mine!” shouted Everett, who had driven John around a table in pursuit of the flying shuttlecock. But John tipped it with his battledore before it touched the floor, and sent it flinging back to Everett.

  “Mere presumption,” answered John, pushing his hair out of his eyes with his free hand.

  Everett dove and returned the shuttlecock with a slashing blow, his battledore sounding in the heavy air. With his long arms and legs he had a decided advantage over John or William when it came to reach. He sent it right back to John, and John returned it.