Date: 30-04-2000
Owning Institution: National Portrait Gallery, courtesy of a Private Collection
Publication:       Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”  
Subject:     19th Century    

The biographer Mary Trevelyan said that Millais’s portrait of Ruskin “has as much drama behind it as any picture in history”. It is certainly hard to think of a painting created in more turbulent circumstances.

As he set out to to portray Ruskin communing with nature, in the summer of 1853, Millais himself had begun to commune with Ruskin’s young and neglected wife, Effie. While the most celebrated art critic in Victorian England busied himself with the index to The Stones of Venice, Millais and Effie fell in love. Not long afterwards, Effie finally plucked up the courage to challenge the legality of her six-year marriage to Ruskin, on the grounds that it had never been consummated. The marriage was annulled. Millais belatedly finished his portrait of Ruskin. A year later Effie became his wife.

Trevelyan’s absorbing book Millais and the Ruskins (1967) tells the whole story in great detail. But even if the troubled circumstances behind the painting were not known the viewer might still sense that something, here, is not quite right. Ruskin stands before us in a wild natural landscape of the kind that he frequently hymned in his writings. His feet are planted on a boulder of crystalline slate rock, the surface of which sparkles with silvery lichen, while behind him a mountain torrent flows and foams. But “the prophet of nature” seems curiously out of place in this particular corner of the natural world. In his cravat and frock-coat, he is an incongruously urbane figure. He might almost have been cut out from another picture and arbitrarily superimposed here. An alien presence, he seems himself alienated from all the life and beauty that surrounds him, to judge by his glassy stare and his air of incurable introspection.

Millais conceived the picture during what began as a carefree holiday with the Ruskins in the Scottish Highlands. While visiting the tiny hamlet of Glenfinlas, in the Trossachs, the artist decided to paint “Ruskin’s portrait by one of these rocky streams.” Millais, at twenty-four, was ten years younger than his sitter, who thought of him as his protégé and regarded him as the most promising member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The portrait that was to cement their friendship ended up as the cause of their estrangement.

It was to be painted, according to Ruskin’s recipe for “absolute, uncompromising truth”, painstakingly from the life. But the weather in Scotland during the summer of 1853 was atrocious, and in an attempt to cheat the incessant rain Millais constructed a kind of tent, under the shelter of which he could continue to paint. But the tent became a kind of wind tunnel so he found himself increasingly confined to the cramped lodgings which he and the Ruskins shared. As weeks turned to months, and Ruskin continued to bury himself in his books, Millais’s feelings for Effie grew stronger and ever more difficult to contain. His attitude to Ruskin correspondingly cooled, as his letters (and this portrait) show.

At first Ruskin is “perfect”, “gentle and forbearing” but he gradually metamorphoses into a “scoundrel” who unforgivably neglects his wife: “an undeniable giant as an author, but a poor weak creature in everything else, bland and heartless, and unworthy – with his great talents – of any woman possessing affection, and sensibility.” Millais made those last remarks during the winter of 1853, a couple of months after returning to London from the abortive holiday with his picture still unfinished. In March of the following year, he wrote that “the portrait is the most hateful task I ever had to perform”. But still he clearly felt compelled to complete it, because he had Ruskin pose several times in his Gower Street studio.

During the last week of April, 1854, Effie left Ruskin for good. In May, as she was being examined by doctors – who found that she was, as she claimed, still a virgin – Millais travelled back to Glenfinlas to put the last touches to the landscape background. “Although it will be dreadfully strange revisiting it, still I feel it a kind of duty to go there again.”

Despite the best efforts of Ruskin’s biographers, the precise reason for his inability or reluctance to consummate his marriage to Effie remains uncertain. Effie, in a letter to her father, says that “the reason he did not make me his wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening”. Ruskin, in a legal statement, simply declared that “there were circumstances in her person” which “completely checked passion”. It may be, as Mary Lutyens argues, that he was traumatised by the discovery that Effie, unlike the sculpted female nudes with which he was familiar, had pubic hair. Tim Hilton (in John Ruskin: The Early Years)blames menstruation.

Whatever the truth, Millais evidently came to his own conclusions. He made Ruskin’s perceived “unnaturalness” the theme of his portrait. So it was that the figure of the critic, painted in Gower Street, was patched imperfectly into a Highland landscape. Whether the sense of incongruity and clenched self-absorption that resulted was achieved by accident, or design, the portrait summed up what the artist had come to think of the sitter.

Millais’s Ruskin stands and watches, impassively, as the crashing stream flows past him. It will never splash him, and he will never step into it.