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Prodigies in art are much more rare than prodigies in chess or music. The two most famous are Pablo Picasso and John Millais. An immensely popular retrospective exhibition of Millais work has just moved from the Tate Britain to Amsterdam, where it will open next week, then go on to Tokyo. It unexpectedly reveals many parallels between the two artists who were a century apart. Both became famous and enormously rich.
Millais' fame ebbed last century because his painting was often narrative, completely at odds with the 20th century emphasis on purely painterly qualities. Like Picasso, he could draw brilliantly from an early age. At 13, he was the youngest student ever accepted to the Royal Academy School and he was a complete master of all styles of academic painting in his teens.
At the start of the Tate exhibition was a big historical painting, Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru that would have made the name of any mature academic painter. Millais was 16 when he did it.
Picasso moved from academic painting through Symbolism to his revolutionary style of Cubism. Millais too shocked the art world with revolutionary paintings. He joined the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, poet and painter. The group thought that, since the Renaissance, Raphael's great rhetoric had destroyed the directness and innocence of art. Millais used his immense talents to make pictures loaded with detail but realistic and awkward in composition. One of the two most famous at this time was Isabella, taken from a tragic poem by Keats. It shows a feast with an ill-fated clerk offering the equally tragic Isabella a blood orange. It is signed with the letters "PRB" proclaiming his allegiance to the brotherhood.
The other work from this period is Christ in the House of his Parents, a wonderfully tender and sensitive painting which was savagely attacked by the critics. The scene is an incident in Joseph's workshop; the child Jesus has cut his hand on a nail and the blood drips on his feet in a pre-figuration of the Crucifixion. Mary and Joseph show the utmost concern and the young John the Baptist brings a bowl of water.
The painting was attacked because it was much too realistic when dealing with spiritual matters. Leading the charge was Charles Dickens, who described Mary as "so horrible in her ugliness, she would stand out as a monster in the lowest gin shop in England".
In 1852, Millais won over the public with what is still one of the most visited and admired paintings in the Tate, the iconic Ophelia, which shows the doomed woman floating down a stream to her muddy death. The model was Rossetti's wife, Elizabeth Siddall. Millais was so determined to be realistic he kept her immersed in a bath kept warm by lamps underneath so he could get the effects right.
Ophelia changed his reputation. From then on he went from triumph to triumph. His complete command over representation was allied to thoughtful subjects such as the touching Blind Girl, who cannot see the beautiful landscape around her, and the singularly lovely The Return of the Dove to the Ark.
All the time his style was becoming more free. He needed to paint more quickly because he had a wife and a growing family. His principal defender in his Pre-Raphaelite days was the critic John Ruskin, who insisted on Millais accompanying him and his wife to Scotland to paint a portrait commissioned by the critic's father. Millais fell in love with Ruskin's wife, Euphemia; the Ruskins' marriage was dissolved on the grounds of non-consummation and the painter and "Effie" married and began a family. Although Millais became president of the Royal Academy and Sir John Millais, the first painter to be made a baronet, his wife was never received in court by Queen Victoria until after his death.
Millais' technical brilliance never left him. But the way he used nuns, pretty young girls and historical figures like Sir Walter Raleigh as a boy listening to an old seaman made him popular and mistrusted for sentimentality. His paintings of children now seem unbearably sweet.
Yet this huge exhibition, the first retrospective of Millais' work for 30 years, has unfamiliar paintings often from private collections that show his astonishing powers of colour and design as well as narrative that is far from sentimental. Such a work is Esther which shows the Jewish heroine at the moment of risking her life by making a forbidden visit to the Persian king to plead for her people.
A portrait of his curly-headed grandson blowing bubbles bought him notoriety as well as fame. This charming exercise was bought by one T.J. Barratt to use an advertisement for Pear's Soap. The painting was reproduced as a coloured lithograph with a bar of the famous transparent soap inserted as part of a huge publicity campaign. Millais was condemned for degrading his talent.
Yet in this grand exhibition, the successful paintings quite outweigh the sometimes silly, sentimental ones. The last room is devoted to the moody landscapes he painted late in life, mostly in Scotland. Unexpectedly, these were much admired by Van Gogh when he worked in London.
Almost at the end of the exhibition there is a familiar friend, Blow, Blow Thou Winter Wind, a painting on loan from the Auckland Art Gallery. The painting is filled with winter cold and tells the story of a woman and babe deserted by her husband. All of the values of Millais' painting career are found in this work.
Millais was an upright English gentleman rather than a wild Spaniard but like Picasso he made paintings as immortal as any art can be.
