It has been frequently said of Millais's artistic career, that he squandered his talent for money and status. A view based upon subsequent work as an illustrator, the paintings executed for commercial advertising, the drained palate of his later painting used to such emotionless effect. All would indicate some truth to this opinion. The early colourful effervescence of his talent, didn't just fizzle out and die, it carried on afterwards as a deathless ghostly apparition of itself. But by the mid 1850's, when he was painting Autumn Leaves, Millais had become the leading light and acceptable face of the Pre-Raphaelites. A transgressively vivid painter of allegorical literary or biblical scenes,with often this sense for the transient,elements of mystery and complete mastery of the mournful mood. Autumn Leaves was the first in a sequence of paintings to explore that season as a metaphor for impermanence. Two other paintings in this occasional series The Vale of Rest(1858-62 ) and Chill October (1870) were to follow.
In some respects the progression of their subject matter exemplifies the slow malformation of Millais's artistic muse. The Vale of Rest appears, at first glance, to echo the sentiments of Autumn Leaves. Taking place at twilight, where two nuns are very hurriedly digging a grave before it gets too dark to see what they are doing. What was perhaps merely suggestive in Autumn Leaves, is made emphatically plain in Vale of Rest. The allegory is presented with a much heavier handed intent, earnestly reaching out to make itself known. It drives home its evidently mordant moral undertow. The seated nun on the right, looking pointedly straight out at the viewer, as if to say - remember this. As a painting this is not subtle.
By the time we reach Chill October fourteen years later, what we are presented with here is a rather bleakly plein-air painting of a Scottish loch, boggy and windy and cold hearted. No figures, allegorical or otherwise, are present, just a vague sense of an underlying mood from the earlier works resurfacing.The place is desolate, lost of any sense of direction for its soul, devoid of human context or frailty. Its not then unreasonable to question why this shift in focus happened ?
The original seven members of The Pre-Raphealite Brotherhood were an unwieldy mixture of like minded young painters and poets. For all their stated idealism, it is in the nature of such artistic movements to be internally fractious, loosely aligned and inherently fragile collectives. Holman Hunt and Millais, were the visual realists, whereas Rossetti and his artistic acolytes were the more seriously aligned medievalists. Both sides dedicated to restoring the spiritual to art. The religious controversy over Millais’s Christ in the House of his Parents in 1850 proved too much for the devout Stephen Collinson, who left the group.
This was the first, but not the final straw for the Brotherhood, but that too would be supplied by Millais. John Ruskin had been the sole vocal champion of The Brotherhood, keeping them financially and artistically directed. Millais went to paint a portrait of Ruskin at his Scottish home, over the Summer of 1853. Ruskin had married Effie Grey in 1848 when she was nineteen, and he was twenty eight. Yet five years later when the handsome dashing Pre-Raphaelite Millais turns up, Ruskin had yet to consummate that marriage. Millais and Effie fast fell deeply in love and literally ran off together. The marriage to Ruskin ended up being very publicly anuled, bringing a degree of shame and disapproval into Ruskin's revered orbit. Though he continued to financially support Hunt and Rosetti, The Brotherhood was summarily ripped apart by the ensuing public scandal.
Three years later Millais married Effie, she has since been unfairly made to take the lion share of the blame for Millais’s declining artistry. Yet here he is in that very same year of his marriage painting Autumn Leaves. The two central young girls,dressed in the modest dark blue clothing of the middlingly wealthy, are Effie’s sisters, Alice and Sophie. The younger children are meant to be peasants, as they are wearing poorer styles of dress. They’re making a bonfire. All look upon the smoldering pyre of autumn leaves the girls have been gathering, collectively transfixed. The background sky has sickly sulphuric slashes of yellow and bruised purpley blue. It is twilight, the landscape shadowy, all we see are the barest of outlines.
This painting has a Chekovian air, of trapped lives with limited future prospects. The faces of the elder girls bare concerned strained faces. For some reason this bonfire building is not eliciting any childish playfulness, or sense of this being a fun thing to do. The girls look on instead rather sombre, with bowed depressed demeanours. It is as though something has died, and no one here feels willing to openly enjoy even a simple task. Whilst lost childhood innocence is a recurrent Millais theme, I’m not sure that is precisely what is being conveyed here. Its meaning feels more multi-layered than that. It is as though they’re mourning a loss, ritually burying someone or something underneath this huge pile of bronzed leaves. The tone is sorrowful, emotions just about staying contained. The littlest girl with the red bow is holding an apple, frequently interpreted as a reference to Eve and the temptation of the snake. What is the simmering symbolism of a smouldering pile of leaves? This is portraying life requiring death, as a cycle within life itself, of recurring moments of cremation. Millais understood all too clearly, what he had lost, destroyed and sacrificed to secure his love.
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