The Times Archive
The Times Archive Blog - Blogging 200 years of The Times from 1785-1985
July 29, 2009
What The Times had to say about those Desperate Romantics ...
... and what Ruskin really thought about Millais.
The BBC's latest costume drama, with Millais, Holman Hunt and Rosetti played as Young British Artists with Ruskin as their Charles Saatchi, has rather divided the TV critics.
Caitlin Moran (for The Times) gives it a blistering thumbs down, while Roland White (for The Sunday Times) thinks it's a lot of fun.
This may just be summer schedule fatigue, but I'm with Roland White. One thing that came out in last night's episode was how obsessed the artists were with their reviews, so, after watching Elizabeth Siddall freezing in the bath at some length, I had a look at the Archive to see what the paper thought of Millais' Ophelia when it was first exhibited.
Not much is the answer. Our reviewer who went to the Royal Academy's 1852 private view said:
There must be something strangely perverse in an imagination which souses Ophelia in a weedy ditch, and robs the drowning struggle of that lovelorn maiden of all pathos and beauty.
A few days later, he had another go:
Mr Millais' Ophelia in her pool ... makes us think of a dairymaid in a frolic ... [he] has attempted to render the very act of drowning as if it were some freak of rude health instead of the climax of distraction.
I believe these young artists to be at a most critical point of their career, from which they may either sink into nothingness or rise to very real greatness.
and in this thoughtful letter he tries to analyse why their paintings are so unpopular, and concludes:
I wish them all heartily good speed, believing in sincerity that if they temper the courage and energy which they have shown in the adoption of their system with patience and discretion in pursuing it, and if they do not suffer themselve to be driven by harsh or careless criticism into rejection of the ordinary means of obtaining influence over the minds of others, they may, as they gain experience, lay in our England the foundations of a school of art nobler than the world has seen for 300 years.
"A dairymaid in a frolic", Ophelia, by John Everett Millais, Tate Gallery Posted by Rose Wild on July 29, 2009 in Arts