Transformative Beauty by Woodson-Boulton Amy;

Author:Woodson-Boulton, Amy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press

Sir John Everett Millais, Autumn Leaves, 1855–1856. © Manchester City Galleries.

Monkhouse declared: “Its freshness at the moment consisted in its absolute absence of ‘subject’ in what would now be called a ‘literary’ sense. It was a painted ‘song without words.’”129 Victorian critics thus found a variety of ways to approach the painting, both at its original exhibition and in assessments of the artist in the 1890s; in the latter, most understood Autumn Leaves as a landmark for the artist because of its multiple levels of meaning and interpretation.

With these ideas in mind, it is interesting that Stanfield, in the Manchester City Art Gallery catalogue of 1895, chose to incorporate the two prominent approaches to the work, quoting both Stephens (identified only as “a well-known critic”) and Ruskin. The initial description of the painting gives both a detailed account of the subject and a spiritual interpretation, quoting John 9:4: “The sun has sunk, the whole valley is full of a luminous mist, out of which, at intervals, stark, denuded poplars rise sharp against the sky, which has been golden, but now fades to a dun brassiness, while in the zenith is the black and purple fringe of night—‘For the night cometh when no man can work.’”130 The catalogue also provided a detailed biography, some of which was taken directly from Shepherd’s piece of 1881.131

Millais’s Autumn Leaves participated in the core debates about art in the late Victorian period in three important ways. First, the painting conveyed an idea and a mood without a clear narrative, expressive of the beauty of the scene. Millais’s wife Effie recorded in her journals that “he wished to paint a picture full of beauty and without subject,” and, after decades of the work of Whistler, Moore, Burne-Jones, and others of the aesthetic movement, critics such as Monkhouse and Spielmann could read it in this way.132 Second, the painting brought up all of the problems of assessing the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and John Ruskin at the end of the nineteenth century, notably in the morality tale of the artist’s own career, raising the ever-present debate about beauty and truth. Third, the painting spoke to a deeper spiritual interpretation; William Holman Hunt remembered Millais speaking of “the odour of burning leaves” as “the incense offered by departing summer to the sky,” and Millais and others conceived of the work as a metaphorical exploration of scriptural passages on death.133 The delicacy of the painting and its rare combinations of the literal and the figurative, harmonious coloration and closely observed detail, portraiture and beauty, meant that it achieved the rare status of an almost universally acknowledged “masterpiece.”134 These very qualities bring out the constant tension in Victorian thought between the natural and the spiritual and the narrative and the symbolic. Other paintings attempting to transcend these categories often met with criticism, but the timing of this one (after the most heated attacks on the Pre-Raphaelites had calmed) and its particular qualities seem to have given it great critical weight.

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