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THE SONGWRITER AS POET:
IAN MCCULLOCH AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITE TRADITION
Kristin F. Smith
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Chapter 9: Public Success and Private Vision
Politicians have a maxim: the more you broaden your base, the more you dilute your message. If you displease no one, you stand for nothing. The same holds true of the arts. How do you reconcile your inner vision of mystical, erotic medieval women with a collective public desire for nice pictures of children and dogs? The Pre-Raphaelites confronted the issue in their own lives in various ways and with varying degrees of success. Ian McCulloch holds the need to remain true to one's vision as a major tenet, and has explored the ramifications of this attitude throughout his career.
John Millais could have been the greatest painter of the 19th Century. His technical skills far outstripped those of Rossetti (genius to the contrary, Rossetti never quite mastered certain basics, most notably perspective.) Millais understood what it meant to be a Pre-Raphaelite, and he believed in it. His works of the late 1840s and 1850s attest to that. Beautifully colored, carefully detailed scenes from Tennyson, Keats or the Bible, or semi-mystical visions of his own stand among the finest Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Autumn Leaves [1856], arguably Millais' best picture, haunts. Four young girls stand in a perfectly-painted twilight with their rakes and baskets of leaves, a captured moment in time. The painting's suggestions of ephemeral beauty, sweet melancholy and hidden meanings could serve as a definition of Pre-Raphaelitism.
In 1850, when the critics finally noted the Pre-Raphaelite 'conspiracy' - and reacted as if they had uncovered a last outpost of heathenism in their midst -- Millais took the brunt of the attack. He withstood it stoically. Hunt's and Rossetti's paintings (Rossetti's a startling version of The Annunciation) also garnered scorn and derision. Things looked very dark.
Then John Ruskin, the most influential voice of his time in matters cultural, came to the aid of the struggling young painters. In two letters to the London Times, he deplored the vicious attacks, urged tolerance for the young and the innovative, and gave the Pre-Raphaelites credibility. Already their chief defender, he soon became a close friend and generous mentor, taking a particular interest in Millais. For his part, Millais successfully wooed and won Mrs. Ruskin in one of the great scandals of the Victorian Age.
Millais had remarked that people would do well to buy his pictures before he had a family to provide for, while he was painting for the love of his art, not the money it brought in. This proved unfortunately prophetic; he drifted into Victorian genre painting, often featuring rosy-cheeked, simpering children or sentimentalized lovers. He did quite a number of portraits of the rich and famous. Some of these paintings are very fine and very beautiful. But they are the work of an artist who has chosen the easier, more conventional path.
Hunt, a very stubborn, very focused man who regarded his paintings as his form of service to God [Note 7], never swerved from his chosen course. Rossetti stopped exhibiting in public but, after lean years in the 1850s, managed to gather around him a group of loyal patrons - newly rich industrialists who might lack 'classical' education but knew genius when they saw it, and would buy what he wanted to paint. Burne-Jones, mild and gentle in his nature but steely in his convictions about art, resigned from the prestigious Old Watercolour Society in a dispute over nudity in one of his paintings.
Millais became a member of the Royal Academy, and was made its President in 1896, the last year of his life. In later years, he spoke ambivalently of his Pre-Raphaelite pictures, sometimes deriding them as the work of a 'boy'. He died a baronet and a very wealthy man, mourned by a nation. But perhaps he knew what he had given up. At an 1886 retrospective exhibition of his work, he admitted, "I have so far failed in my maturity to fulfill the full forecast of my youth" [Hardin, pg. 70]. According to Holman Hunt (not an impartial witness), Millais left the exhibition in tears.
In Start Again [CANDLELAND; 1989], Ian McCulloch writes, "I had it in my hands; lost my nerve". John Millais never lost his nerve. He simply cared so little about his artistic principles, he let them slip away.
Note 7: But Hunt was no proselytizer. Far from being Jerry Falwell with a paintbrush, he acknowledged that there are many roads to the truth, and disapproved of efforts to convert Jews, Muslims and others. This attitude hardened after a bad experience in the 1850s with the missionary community in Jerusalem. See George P. Landow, William Holman Hunt and the Missionaries [THE PRE-RAPHAELITE REVIEW, 1 (1977), 27--33.]: http://www.thecore.nus.edu.sg/landow/victorian/painting/whh/whhmission.html
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An Annotated Discography: Works by Echo and the Bunnymen, Ian McCulloch, Will Sergeant, Electrafixion and Glide (off-site link)
Echo and the Bunnymen, Ian McCulloch and Electrafixion: Album Reviews (off-site link)
The Bunnymen Concert Log: A comprehensive, annotated listing of concert dates, venues and set lists for Echo and the Bunnymen, Ian McCulloch and Electrafixion (off-site link)
Bunnymen.info - The (Unofficial) News Source (off-site link, run by Charles Pham)
Aldems' Political Quotations: Apt and Otherwise
BlindFool and Scruffy Dog: Dilettantes-at-Large
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