KEY POINTS:
John Everett Millais, so Victorian, so fond of the briar pipe and the higher moral virtues, first sold out to big business with the painting now popularly known as Bubbles.
This tousled moppet in tiny shoes staring up at a large and surprisingly ponderous example was to have
been called A Child's World, with the emphasis on innocent wonder. But Millais sold the copyright almost before the paint was dry, the ad men inserted the Pears soap and Bubbles was born as an English advert.
And as in 1886, so once again today: Millais' Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia in her lush stream is the postcard nine out of 10 visitors apparently send home from the Tate Britain in central London.
How Millais got from the radical intensity of Ophelia to the schlock of Bubbles 30 years later was a consuming question for Victorian critics.
John Ruskin, who once predicted Millais would outdo Titian, believed he had simply lost touch with the natural world, with the hyper-real truth of every blade of grass and Pre-Raphaelite dewdrop. Arthur Symonds thought it was merely greed: "Millais would paint whatever came before him, Gladstone or Cinderella, if it would bring ready fame and money."
But the curators of this lifetime retrospective on show at the Tate Britain- amazingly, the first in a century - have a different answer, which is that Millais never lost it at all, that there is innovation throughout his career right down to the Renaissance quotations in Bubbles.
They want to make a 21st century artist of him and though comparisons with Warhol and Hirst (mass reproduction on the one hand, insane celebrity on the other) may be somewhat specious, the show and the catalogue are powerfully persuasive.
Millais' internationalism, for instance, would have seemed an oxymoron to me before seeing him whole. The Millais who illustrated Shakespeare, Tennyson and Arthurian legend, every corner of whose paintings is forever England from the budding dog rose to the frosted oak leaf; this same painter was revered by Van Gogh for his late landscapes, those torrential outpourings of nature free of any framing devices that put you suddenly on the spot, right there among the icy waters or the twilit rocks.
This is the same Millais who inspired Sargent and Whistler, whose portrait of Thomas Carlyle has something like Manet in the loose brushwork of the hands; who dwells on the lessons of Rembrandt in his earliest works and Velazquez in his last. Once you consider the paintings in this counter-intuitive way, Millais looks weirder and more original by the minute.
Ferdinand Lured by Ariel, for instance, could have been made on LSD it is so dreamlike in its heightened detail; 20 different kinds of grass have been identified in its patch of meadow.
Ferdinand may be straining to hear the voice of the transatlantic operator, which in a sense he is. No matter how extreme Millais' poses, even to the point of outlandish, they always multiply the meaning of his visions. Ophelia with her open-mouthed beauty and her palms held wide may be giving her finest aria or blessing the world as she leaves it. Mariana in the moated grange, abandoned by her lover, leans backwards with hands to her spine, yearningly unfulfilled, yet also easing herself as if poignantly pregnant.
Visionary narrative anchored in extreme reality: that is Millais' gift. He was so obsessed with authenticity that he would have period costumes specially tailored and hire soldiers and carpenters to pose for their professions. He is a method painter; control and premeditation are central to his art. A leaf never rustles unexpectedly, a girl never tears open a love letter but studies the envelope carefully.
This is just as well in the Pre-Raphaelite period where the density of detail could so easily overwhelm the eye.
But there is so much more to Millais, as this exhibition shows. His passion for the pivotal moment when things could go either way: he could leave, she could leave, that letter may be fateful. His genius for atmospheric pathos: a smoky chill in the air, a double rainbow against overcast skies, the inklings of twilight in November ponds. It is always autumn in Millais; even the hieratic face of Tennyson seems gathered out of fallen leaves.
Tennyson towers above you like an Old Testament prophet. Disraeli, his gaze withdrawn beneath long black lashes, stands stylishly erect though he was close to death. Gladstone looks into the distance, tireless, exhortatory, pragmatic. There are no props, no backdrops, no emblems of office, nothing in these austere portraits but the one thing needed: force of character.
Millais was also capable of painting some almost boring portraits when faced with dull people. He couldn't make it up and, whenever he tried to, his portraits failed. And not just his portraits: over the years, it seems that the tension between fact and fiction is always at issue.
If it is hard to love the big setpieces of the later years, from the saccharine Cherry Ripe to the super-patriotic The Northwest Passage, one understands their ambition to create mood without incident far better in the context of this show. But Millais, alas, collapses without the aid of a good solid character or plot. His own character is tremendously elusive.
A prodigy so exceptional his first works take your breath away, he was simultaneously a cultural rebel and a social reactionary. He could offend Protestant England with his religious allegories and win it back with soap ads. He gave up the astounding particularity of the Pre-Raphaelite masterworks to try and paint more like his exact opposite, Velazquez.
For all the stasis of his art, Millais seems to have an unconscious longing for alteration. It is one of the surprises of this show that this supposedly staunch Victorian experienced multiple personalities.