A Scottish Farm, by William Henry Millais (1828-1899). 1853. Watercolour touched with white and strengthened with gum arabic. 7 1/8 x 13 inches (18 x 33 cm). Collection: British Museum, registration no. 1974,0615.8. Image © The Trustees of the British Museum, reproduced under the term of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
According to Christopher Newall: "William Millais was the first artist deliberately to apply the principles of Pre-Raphaelitism to landscape subjects" (106). William Michael Rossetti, in his diary relating to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, wrote of W. H. Millais's first attempts at being an artist and the fact that it was his brother John who pushed him in the direction of being a Pre-Raphaelite landscape painter. His first diary entry on this subject is dated 19 November 1849: "His brother has begun painting a little from still life etc., and Millais intends to get him to do landscape pieces" (Fredeman 26). Another entry on 29 December 1849 reads: "Millais's brother continues to paint still life and objects in Nature with great success, and is determined to become a professional artist. John is to bully him into doing nothing all next summer but paint out in the fields" (Fredeman 38). Rossetti later reported on 24 October 1850 the success William was having with his watercolours: "His brother, William Millais, is also turning his attention to art; and produced, when in Jersey during the summer, some excellent and most promising landscapes, which he will probably exhibit" (Fredeman 72).
This watercolour, A Scottish Farm, must date from the time when the Millais brothers were invited by John and Effie Ruskin to accompany them on their Scottish summer holiday to the Trossachs in 1853. The farm was therefore likely located in Perthshire. In the foreground stands a farmer wearing a tartan kilt and brown jacket and holding what is likely a long pitchfork in his right hand. The figure is not particularly successful, an early indication that landscape and not figure drawing was to be William's forte. To the left of the farmer are two cattle and to the right is a series of small haycocks. In the midground are the farmhouse and a number of outbuildings, some of which are now merely ruins. A range of tall rolling hills are in the background, surmounted by a cloudy sky that is suggestive of oncoming rain, to the right of the composition. At the top left a row of trees are present at the crest of the hill. Lindsay Stainton has commented that the work's brilliant intense colour, in particular the use of violet-blue and emerald green, is "characteristically Pre-Raphaelite" (190). Kim Sloan, on a label written for the exhibition Places of the Mind in 2017, noted that the technique William used was also characteristic of Pre-Raphaelite watercolour usage, being made up of stipples and hatches of watercolour with bodycolour, the type of style and technique that was admired by Ruskin.
Bibliography
Fredeman, William E. Ed. The P.R.B. Journal. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
Gere, John. Pre-Raphaelite Drawings in the British Museum. London: British Museum Press, 1994, 127.
Rossetti, William Michael Ed. Praeraphaelite Diaries and Letters. London: Hurst and Blacett Ltd., 1900, 242, 277-78.
A Scottish Farm. British Museum. Web. 12 November 2024.
Sloan, Kim. "The 'tormentingly elusive' art of drawing landscape", in Kim Sloan Ed. Places of the Mind: British watercolour landscapes 1850-1950. London: British Museum Press, 2017, 24-67.
Stainton, Lindsay. British Landscape Watercolours 1600-1860. London: British Museum Press, 1985, 190.
Wilcox, Scott and Christopher Newall. Victorian Landscape Watercolours. New York: Hudson Hill Press, 1992, 106.
Created 12 November 2024