Take another look at Millais

Andrew Lambirth urges those who think they don’t like this artist to go and see this show

Last chance to see this large and lavish retrospective of the most famous of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Millais (Tate Britain, until 13 January). The Tate confidently asserts that John Everett Millais (1829–96) was the ‘greatest’ of the association which initially consisted of Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and himself, with a handful of fellow-travellers. Later Burne-Jones and William Morris formed a second-generation PRB, and there were other useful associates like Ford Madox Brown, William Dyce, Arthur Hughes and John Brett. To call Millais the ‘greatest’ is to oversimplify matters. Although Rossetti wasn’t a great painter technically, his poetic vision was remarkable and arguably more powerful than anything Millais did, while Holman Hunt was a great painter of startling and sometimes awkward originality. He tends to be marginalised somewhat, not appealing quite so much as Millais to the inherent sentimentality of the British, though the magnificent two-volume catalogue raisonné of Hunt’s work recently published by Yale goes some way to set the record straight.