Scottish love affair

In 1838 the Duke of Sussex was presenting the awards for drawing at the Society of Art, when the silver medallist failed to appear. His Grace complained that he was taking his time, until someone pointed out the nine-year-old Mr J.E. Millais hovering below his line of vision. The Duke patted the young prodigy on the head and told him to write if there was ever anything he needed. Millais took up the offer, but not to advance his artistic career. Instead, he begged the Duke for the restoration of fishing rights for himself and his brother William in the Round Pond.

That the painter of all those bloodless Pre-Raphaelite beauties should have had a passion for blood sports is not such a contradiction as it may seem. Capturing images is, after all, a form of hunting and many great artists, including Goya, have shared his enthusiasm. To the young founder of Pre-Raphaelitism, cooped up in his Bloomsbury studio, a day’s hunting or shooting with his friend the Punch cartoonist John Leech presented the opportunity to pursue the PRB precept of ‘Truth and the Free Field of Unadulterated Nature’ in its broadest sense. But it was only after his introduction to Scotland in 1853 that Millais’s passions for art and field sports fused.

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The story of that introduction — the Highland holiday from hell with John and Effie Ruskin when the lovesick artist painted the crusty critic on the banks of the Finglas while the Ruskins’ unconsummated marriage hit the rocks — is now notorious. What is less well documented is Millais’s subsequent love affair with Perthshire, where he and the Perth-born Effie made their first home after their eventual marriage in 1855. From the mid-1850s, glimpses of Perthshire appear in subject paintings such as ‘Autumn Leaves’ and ‘The Vale of Rest’, but it is not until 1870, in ‘Chill October’, that the artist turns his focus on the landscape itself.