As Victoria’s long reign drew to a close, John Everett Millais, who died in 1896, was probably the most widely popular artist in England, and George Frederic Watts, who lived on until 1904, the most respected. Millais was Sir Henry Tate’s favorite painter, and nine major paintings by him, ranging from the early Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia (1851–52) to later public favorites such as The Boyhood of Raleigh (1870), entered the Tate Gallery, which opened in 1897, as gifts of the founder or his widow. Henry Tate owned no works by Watts, but between 1897 and 1903 the artist more than compensated by presenting no less than twenty-four of his own works to the new institution. Between them the two artists constituted the most visible dimension of modern or recent British art at the Tate and elsewhere well into the twentieth century. As late as 1938, the Tate maintained a large gallery devoted exclusively to Watts. But as any visitor to the Tate in the past forty years can attest, all of this has changed. Ophelia has stayed on view, usually as part of a display of Pre-Raphaelite pictures from the 1850s, but, otherwise, the once famous and beloved masterpieces of the two artists have disappeared into the semi-permanent limbo of museum storage, emerging occasionally for special exhibitions or token appearances in heterogeneous displays of nineteenth-century art.

Their fall from favor can, of course, be seen as part of a larger redirection of taste that damned almost every nineteenth-century painting that did not fit within a French Realist/Impressionist/Post-Impressionist mainstream as “academic” and unworthy of serious attention. In addition, the works of each artist did call forth specific bills of complaint. Watts aimed too high. In the editors’ words on the first page of Representations of G. F. Watts, “Written off as an impossible concoction of the classical and the demotic, the heroic and the sentimental, the amorphous and the capricious, he is interred by Virginia Woolf, D. S. MacColl and others in the Valhalla of Victorian painting: a dead soul buried with the epitaph ‘Here lies one whose name was washed away by its own bathos.’” Millais, on the other hand, aimed too low. On his first page, Paul Barlow succinctly summarizes the conventional view: “Millais was a purveyor of kitsch.” Needless to say, the authors of the two books under review do not share those attitudes, and both books can be seen as efforts to redeem their subjects from the harsh judgments of our parents and grandparents. But neither book is likely to do much to sway public opinion. Both belong to a series, “British Art and Visual Culture Since 1750: New Readings,” published by Ashgate, a house that has specialized in the work of younger, mainly British, scholars. The style is austerely academic: standardized modest scale, too few illustrations, eight color plates in the book on Watts, none in the book on Millais. The paucity of illustration makes the latter, in particular, torture to read. Barlow indulges in long formal analyses that might be rewarding if we could only see what he is talking about, but time and again we are left frustrated, wondering about the point of discussing in detail the color and finer points of composition of unfamiliar and unillustrated paintings. While the costs of photographs and transparencies and the allied charges for publishing them have become notorious, books rendered meaningless by lack of adequate illustration hardly seem to solve the problem. Instead, they compound it. Since they are so physically unappealing, they attract few purchasers; hence small press runs and astronomical prices, leading to yet fewer sales, and so on. Who is served by this vicious cycle apart from the authors, who see their names in print and titles on their curricula vitae?

Representations of G. F. Watts is a collection of nine essays by eight authors. As such, it is rather a mixed bag, with no overall message beyond a shared assumption that Watts deserves more serious and sympathetic attention than he usually receives. It contains informative and well-documented discussions of Watts’s gifts to the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery by Alison Smith and Lara Parry respectively, as well as several more subjective, interpretative contributions, of which I learned most from Elizabeth Prettejohn’s essay on the artist’s Homeric and Ovidian subjects and Stephanie Brown’s on his sculpture. There is also an ambitious essay by Paul Barlow, the author of the second book under review, with the provocative title, “The Pointless Meaningfulness of Watts’s Work,” which brings us back to the impossible concoction that was a turn-off for the generation of Woolf and MacColl, but has become grist for the mills of cutting-edge academic scholarship.

Apart from the introduction, written jointly by the editors, the remaining essays are: “‘To Intensify the Sense of Teeming Life’: Watts and the Twilight of Transcendence,” by Colin Trodd, which is about The Genius of Greek Poetry (1850s–1878); “Watts, Historical Thought and the Schemes of Painting in the 1840s,” by Janet McLean, mainly about the artist’s involvement in the decoration of the Houses of Parliament; “Illuminating Experience: Watts and the Subject of Portraiture,” again by Trodd, whose focal points are one male portrait, Lord Lawrence (1862), and one female, Mrs. Nassau Senior (1858); and “Watts, Women, Philanthropy and the Home Arts,” by Shelagh Wilson, for whom Mrs. Watts, as both “heroine” and “victim,” plays the central role. Despite all this, there is a lot about Watts that the book does not touch upon. His many landscapes go unmentioned, and his activity as a painter of frescoes or murals in the 1850s is barely discussed. Prettejohn’s essay on the Homeric and Ovidian subjects, for example, concentrates upon work from after 1860 and ignores both the Homeric fresco of Achilles Watching Briseis Led Away from His Tents, originally at Bowood, and painted in 1858, and the Ovidian Elements for 7 Carlton House Terrace, painted a few years earlier. The latter frescoes are a surprising oversight, since his most ambitious single work, Chaos (c. 1873–82), which Prettejohn links to Ovid, is closely related to and, I believe, dependent upon the Carlton House Terrace project.

Written by a single author and following a chronological progression through one artist’s career, Barlow’s book has much more focus and a sustained argument. Millais’s oeuvre is usually seen as split between two uneven halves: a brief Pre-Raphaelite phase starting in 1848, and the much longer rest of his life, commencing in the 1860s, when he is said to have sold out, abandoning lofty Pre-Raphaelite ambitions for the sake of popular success and its concomitant rewards. Barlow’s organization acknowledges that split even to the point of a two-page “Interlude” inserted at the half-way point in his text, between early and late Millais, but he rejects the value judgments that usually accompany it. The book is of most interest because of its vigorous championing of Millais’s mature work. Barlow not only points out intriguing continuities between the Pre-Raphaelite and later works, but also argues that we should assess the latter within the context of an international, primarily French, avant-garde, from a perspective entirely divorced from Pre-Raphaelitism and other parochial matters. Edward Burne-Jones is not mentioned in the book, but Edouard Manet turns up frequently. Ruskin is perhaps unavoidable, but his harsh judgments of the changes in Millais’s art are invariably dismissed as unfair, deceitful, and self-serving. Millais’s close friend, the illustrator John Leech, is mentioned once, and then only because the subject of a portrait holds a book by Leech on his lap. The possible importance of Leech in relation both to Millais’s illustrations of the early 1860s and to the illustrative style that started to appear in paintings such as Trust Me! of 1862 is not considered. Indeed, Millais’s illustrations get exceedingly short shrift. His eighty-seven illustrations produced between 1860 and 1869 for the novels of Anthony Trollope are ignored, despite their fame, and despite their centrality in his art, as well as in his life, as a source of income during a trying time. This is a book that does not pretend to be comprehensive or balanced, but rather one with an agenda that we are rarely allowed to lose sight of.

Barlow’s observations and opinions are fresh and provocative, and he brings into his discussion many little-known or heretofore forgotten works, which, if they were illustrated, would expand and enrich our ideas of the artist’s vast later output. Where we can see what he is talking about, his formal analyses, such as that of The Boyhood of Raleigh on page 150, are perceptive and persuasive, making us start to understand the underpinnings of Millais’s great popular appeal. On the other hand, perhaps swept along by the passion of his main argument, the author often seems careless about detail. For example, on page 61 he describes the fireman in The Rescue (1855) as carrying two children, when he, in fact, carries three. On page 95, Trust Me!, which measures 44 1/8 by 30 1/2 inches, is called large, while, on page 129, Hearts Are Trumps (1872), one of Millais’s largest pictures, measuring 65 1/4 by 86 1/2 inches, is listed among the smaller works. Barlow also can ignore evidence that might undermine his arguments. It is perhaps understandable if he chooses to disregard unsympathetic criticism, for example, William Michael Rossetti’s “certainly not overburdened with intricate thought” regarding My First Sermon, exhibited in 1863; but to suppress quotations used as parts of titles in Royal Academy catalogues, presumably because they do not fit the argument, seems questionable. Barlow wants us to see the well-known North-West Passage (1874) in the Tate as a deeply pessimistic picture, “a vision of old age haunted by failures and reduced to resentful passivity” (156), but the title with which Millais exhibited the painting at the Academy in 1874 included the line, “It might be done, and England should do it,” which suggests an entirely different message.

While Barlow is certainly right to challenge the pervasive views of Millais’s later works, he does so by inventing an artist who seems so unlike the Millais described by John Guille Millais in the Life and Letters of his father published in 1899 and by most subsequent commentators as to defy not only the evidence of abundant biographical information, but also often the evidence of the works. His Millais has a profoundly tragic dimension and a continuing fascination with death, found by the author in The North-West Passage, in The Ruling Passion of 1885, and in many of the artist’s landscapes. Even The Boyhood of Raleigh comes down to “decay and death” (150). Stylistically, Barlow links Millais most closely to Whistler among his contemporaries, and to Velázquez among artists of the past, fitting him into the canonical pre-history of modern art, where he can rub shoulders with Manet. But Whistler’s and Manet’s admiration for and borrowings from Velázquez are universally recognized conspicuous components of their art. The same can hardly be said of Millais, although he was certainly well aware of Velázquez and did pay homage to him in one work, his diploma picture presented to the Royal Academy in 1868, titled Souvenir of Velasquez and inspired by the Spanish master’s portraits of the Infanta Margarita. But Barlow finds other, less obvious echoes frequently enough to constitute an obsession, if not necessarily on the part of the artist. Thus he mentions Las Meninas in relation to paintings as diverse as My Second Sermon of 1864, The Minuet of 1866, Hearts Are Trumps of 1872, and The Ruling Passion of 1885. The last-named is “Millais’s most sustained attempt to modernise Velásquez, to construct a Las Meninas for modern social conditions” (168). Perhaps, but the connection is more theoretical than visual. Far more obvious sources that must have been somewhere in Millais’s mind are pictures by Greuze, The Village Bride (1761) and Filial Piety (1763), usually known as Death of the Paralytic. Since Barlow wants to see The Ruling Passage as a deathbed scene (“Even more than The North-West Passage, this is a painting about death, the old man is ill, probably dying,” 165), citation of The Death of the Paralytic would have buttressed what to me is an unconvincing argument; but Greuze is mentioned nowhere in the book, nor indeed are any eighteenth-century deathbed scenes.

“Time Present and Time Past: Millais’s Legacy,” Barlow’s final chapter, examines Millais’s place vis-à-vis the march to modernism as defined by Clement Greenberg. Picasso and Wagner come into the picture, the former because, while like Millais he made a lot of money, he is not usually criticized for selling out. The reason for citing Wagner is that his aspiration to transcend the limits of a single medium in the gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art,” was paralleled in Millais’s subject matter and storytelling, giving his art dimensions beyond the purely visual (198). Not coincidentally, in his essay in Representations of G. F. Watts, Barlow there describes Watts as achieving a Wagnerian synthesis (38). That seems appropriate. Watts’s ambitions were on a Wagnerian scale, even if the realization sometimes fell short. In sheer pretentious grandeur his never-completed House of Life cycle would have been the equal of The Ring of the Nibelungen, and he did think about his art in relation to Wagner: “If I were a poet and musician like Wagner, I could make a fine cantata or oratorio of the subject [of Cain and Abel]” (M. S. Watts, George Frederic Watts: The Annals of an Artist’s Life, vol. 1, 258). But the ambitions of Watts and of Millais were very different, and literary subject matter, while sufficient to ban Millais from the Greenbergian modernist fold, is hardly enough to make the painter of My First Sermon (1863) or Bubbles (1886) a Wagnerian artist.

Both Representations of G. F. Watts and Time Present and Time Past: The Art of John Everett Millais, if flawed as books, are serious and, by-and-large, sophisticated works of up-to-date scholarship. However, in the case of the latter a little less sophistication might have better served the subject. I applaud Barlow’s attention to Millais’s later works and his many intelligent observations regarding them. But his effort to legitimize that work for modern readers by enrolling him in the avant-garde seems misguided. Millais was and remained to the end a more complicated artist than conventional opinion allows, and there are challenging dimensions to his work as well as the too easy sentiment of My First Sermon. Nevertheless, to look only for formal invention and intellectual complexity is to misrepresent him, ignoring the basis of his great public popularity. That popularity was earned, and, pace Clement Greenberg, was legitimate in a century when painting and graphic illustration still provided entertainment and occasional instruction to large audiences, a role subsequently largely ceded to the cinema and television. While I find it hard to see the affinity of The Ruling Passion with Las Meninas or more than superficial similarity between the protagonist of The North-West Passage and Rembrandt’s late self portraits (as suggested by Barlow on pages 156–57), it is easy to imagine either painting as a moment in a Hollywood movie from the 1930s or 1940s featuring C. Aubrey Smith or Lionel Barrymore in the roles of crusty or wise old men. There now is serious and appreciative history of such films, as well as of more highbrow fare, and they are readily accessible via DVDs. We should see, understand, and enjoy popular nineteenth-century art in much the same way, but it is more difficult to do so. And, as much recent writing suggests—not just Barlow’s book on Millais—it is perhaps even more difficult to shed Greenbergian and other inherited twentieth-century prescriptions so that we can view and enjoy it on its own terms.