Charles Allston Collins, 1828 - 1873

Home , A Huguenot, Charles Allston Collins, James Smetham, The Hireling Shepherd, The Rescue (painting), Thomas Combe

INTRODUCTION

In studies of Pre-Raphaelitism Collins has sometimes been overlooked or dismissed as an imitator of Millais, but if we look closely at his life and what little survives of his work, the struggles of this accomplished painter, his achievements and his complex personality become clearer. Dogged by lack of self-confidence and illness, he endured to become the best known of the Pre-Raphaelite painters after Millais, Hunt and Rossetti. Today, less than ten of his paintings survive, and the rediscovery of his important The Devout Childhood of St Elizabeth of Hungary, from the early years of the Brotherhood, reveals a fascinating story.

EARLY YEARS AND PRE-RAPHAELITISM

Charles Allston Collins was born into the artistic elite of London, the son of the artist William Collins R.A., a landscape and genre painter, who was a pupil of Morland. At one point William was the Royal Academy’s Librarian, and for most of his career was closely involved in Academy affairs. He was described by Linnell’s biographer:

‘The worthy Academician, though an amiable, was in many respects rather a weak-minded, man. He appeared always to be oppressed by the twin bugbears propriety and respectability, and found it difficult to forgive anyone who failed in his respect to them.’ i

This fault made him blind to humanity on occasion. William Blake’s biographer recounted:

‘As there was no servant, he [Blake] fetched the porter for dinner himself, from the house at the corner of the Strand. Once, pot of porter in hand, he espied coming along a dignitary of art—that highly respectable man, William Collins, R.A., whom he had met in society a few evenings before. The Academician was about to shake hands, but seeing the porter, drew up, and did not know him.’ ii

Charles’ mother Harriet, née Geddes, was the sister of Margaret Carpenter the portrait painter, and was a very different character from her husband; she had wanted to be an actress, but became a teacher, and educated both her sons at home. Charles Allston Collins was named after his godfather Washington Allston the American history painter, and his older brother William Wilkie Collins was named after his godfather, Sir David Wilkie. Their parents expected great things of them; Wilkie was destined for the Church (but of course rebelled, to become the famous novelist), and it seemed pre-ordained that Charles should be a painter; he joined the Royal Academy schools in 1843. William Holman Hunt, who joined the R.A. schools in 1844 (after three attempts), recalled meeting him for the first time:

‘He was then a remarkable looking boy with statuesquely formed features, of aquiline type, and strong blue eyes. The characteristic that marked him out was his brilliant bushy red hair, which was not of golden splendour, but had an attractive beauty in it.’ iii

Wilkie Collins, with the withering scorn of an older brother, wrote to their mother in 1845 that Charles seemed ‘to have more chance of becoming a member of the Royal Academy of Dancing at Paris, than of the Royal Academy of Arts at London’, iv but Charles had early success with two portraits accepted to the Academy Exhibition at the young age of 19 in 1847. Figure 2. Charles Allston Collins, The Graphic, 3 May 1873, p 413. In character, Charles was abstemious and sensitive. Like his father, he was devout, favouring ‘the Puseyite form of faith.’ v At the R.A. schools he made friends with John Everett Millais, who, although younger by nearly one and a half years, had been admitted as a student three years earlier (the youngest ever at the age of eleven), and was fêted as a child prodigy. The two were well suited, but if Collins’s family connections impressed the ambitious Millais (Collins was the only member of the Pre-Raphaelite circle whose father was a Royal Academician, and the lions of the Royal Academy - Wilkie, Turner, Stothard, Constable and Etty - were frequent visitors to their house), Millais was the dominant personality, for he was irresistibly charming and good-looking (‘everyone, men, women, and children, particularly children, loved Millais’, wrote Mrs. E.M. Ward vi). Millais became a frequent visitor to the Collins household in Hanover Terrace, Regent’s Park (fifteen minutes from Millais’s house in Gower Street), where, especially after the death of William Collins in 1847, Harriet Collins provided a warm and hospitable welcome, enjoying flirtatious banter with her sons’ friends. Millais became her son no. 3, and Hunt became her ‘son no. 4’. vii

Figure 3. Charles Allston Collins, Berengaria’s Alarm for the Safety of her Husband, Richard Coeur de Lion, Awakened by the Sight of his Girdle Offered for Sale at Rome, 1849-50, oil on canvas, 39 3/4 x 42 in, © Manchester Art Gallery

2 Collins showed conventional paintings at the Royal Academy for three years before he converted suddenly to Pre-Raphaelitism with his Berengaria’s Alarm for the Safety of her Husband, Richard Coeur de Lion, Awakened by the Sight of his Girdle Offered for Sale at Rome at the Academy in 1850 (Fig. 3). Hunt explained:

'Collins had sent in his year’s labour in a picture of “Berengaria seeing the Girdle of Richard offered for Sale in Rome.” Under the influence of Millais he had in this work discarded his early manner, and striven to carry out our principles.’ viii

Collins had started working on this ambitious 40” x 50” canvas in about May 1849. The subject is from Agnes Strickland’s Lives of the Queens of England, which Millais was mining at the time for his highly finished drawing of The Disentombment of Queen Matilda (Fig. 4). Berengaria’s Alarm…, painted in pale transparent tints, recalls the complex symbolism of Rossetti’s colour scheme in his The Girlhood of the Mary Virgin (Tate Britain) of 1849, whilst the technique and composition is similar to other early Pre-Raphaelite pictures. By 1850, Millais, who could work quickly, had already moved on and he exhibited two major new paintings alongside Berengaria’s Alarm…. One was his first of an outdoor subject, Ferdinand Lured by Ariel (Private Collection). Painted in extraordinary botanical detail, it follows Ruskin’s advice to young artists given in Volume I of Modern Painters (published in 1843) to go to nature ‘rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing’. Collins did not exhibit his first outdoor subject, Convent Thoughts, until a year later in 1851 (Fig. 5). This pattern, of fresh ideas sparking amongst the Pre-Raphaelites and immediately detonating in fresh paintings by Millais but smouldering over months and more in Collins before any results appeared, was to repeat itself several times over the next five years. Millais even beat Collins to painting the portrait of his own brother, Wilkie, by three years. ix

Millais’s other painting at the Academy of 1850 was Christ in the House of His Parents (Tate Britain). The Pre-Raphaelite paintings at the Academy, and this one in particular, provoked a storm of criticism – Charles Dickens described Mary:

'...so horrible in her ugliness that (supposing it were possible for any human creature to exist for a moment with that dislocated throat) she would stand out from the rest of the company as a monster in the vilest cabaret in France or in the lowest gin-shop in England.’ x

However, it was not so much the brilliant colours and extraordinary detail of the Pre-Raphaelites, which were ugly and disturbing enough to the public, but their religious subjects that truly shocked. xi The subject and treatment of Christ… was suggested to Millais by a sermon he had heard given by E.B. Pusey, the Oxford Movement Theologian, and the painting reads like a Catholic homily.

Relations between Protestants and Catholics, uneasy since the Reformation, were particularly tense in 1850 after Pope Pius IX re- established the Catholic hierarchy in England under the imperious Cardinal Wiseman, in the newly invented role of ‘Archbishop of Westminster’. The Times commented:

‘The absurdity of the selection of this title for this illegitimate prelate is equal to its arrogance. Everybody knows that Westminster never was in early Christian times a Bishop's see, but a monastery ...it is a term devoid of meaning; but its meaning lies, we fear, in an unambiguous intention to insult the Church and the Crown of England…’ xii

The new Archbishop inflamed matters with the regal tone of his first pastoral letter in the Times a fortnight later: ‘Catholic England has been Figure 4. Sir John Everett Millais, The Disentombment of Queen Matilda, 1849, ink on paper, 9 x 17 in, © Tate restored to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament, from which its light had

Figure 6. William Holman Hunt, A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids, 1849-50, oil on canvas, 43 3/4 x 55 1/2 in, © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

4 long vanished’, he wrote. ‘We govern and shall continue to govern… [the Home Counties] …as administrator, with ordinary jurisdiction.’ xiii This ‘Papal Aggression’, as it was seen, xiv provoked an immediate English reaction: savage, unreasoning and widespread hostility directed against all ‘Papists’, and there were several violent ‘No Popery’ riots that winter. Alongside the external threat of Rome, there were also problems within the Anglican Church, where a few High Church clergymen in Oxford wanted to revive Catholic liturgy and ritual in Anglican services, to the great suspicion of the wider community of Low Church Anglicans. Some High Church ideas, published in pamphlets that earned their authors the nickname of ‘Tractarians’, were attractive to the Pre-Raphaelites not only because several of the Brothers worshipped in High churches, but also because they were interested in the revival of things Medieval. Whilst William Michael Rossetti vehemently denied that the Pre-Raphaelites were High Church xv, his mother, both his sisters, and his brother Gabriel in his early years most definitely were, and so were Collins and Millais, who worshipped at the same church as Gabriel and Christina Rossetti (St Andrew’s in Wells Street, known for its High Church ritual, and the chanting of psalms xvi). Rossetti was a suspiciously Italian name and James Collinson, another Brother, actually converted to Rome. Even the term ‘Brotherhood' held suspicious monastic overtones, the more so because their group was originally intended to be secret.

With the exception of Hunt and Collins, the Pre-Raphaelites largely abandoned religious subjects after 1853, but not before had they had been thrust into the limelight with a whiff of incense that infused their harsh, bright and intense paintings with toxic sweetness. Their early ‘idolatrous’ subjects were what they were most heavily criticised for in the press, and after the critical onslaught of 1850, Rossetti almost never exhibited in public again. As the lesser painting Brothers (Walter Deverell, F.G. Stephens and Collinson) dropped away from the centre of attention at the Royal Academy, it was increasingly Millais, Hunt and Collins that became the public face of the Brotherhood, both enjoying the laurels and enduring the brickbats of fame.

TO OXFORD, SUMMER, 1850

In June 1850, heeding Ruskin’s advice to paint from nature and wanting to paint backgrounds, Millais and Collins took a cottage at Botley near Oxford where Millais painted The Woodman’s Daughter (Guildhall Art Gallery) and Collins began Convent Thoughts. Millais had friends nearby in Oxford, particularly the picture collector and dealer James Wyatt whom he had known since 1846: it was probably through him that they first met Thomas Combe, superintendent of the Clarendon Press and a supporter of the Oxford Movement, in the summer of 1850. Millais tried to sell him not one of his own pictures, but one of Hunt’s: A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids of 1849-50 (Fig. 6). He wrote to Hunt from the Wyatt’s house, to whence the picture Figure 5. Charles Allston Collins, Convent Thoughts, 1850-1, oil on canvas, 33 x 23 1/4 in, © Ashmolean had been sent: Museum, University of Oxford

‘I have been hard at work at a man of money, endeavouring to get him to buy your picture …money is of no consequence to him.’ xvii

It was typically generous of Millais to try to sell his friend’s picture first. He and Collins were unusual amongst the Pre-Raphaelites in that they had money of their own, xviii but Hunt was desperately poor. Millais also wrote to Mrs. Combe, recommending Collins to her:

‘…There are few so devotedly directed to the one thought of some day (through the medium of his art) turning the minds of men to good reflections and so heightening the profession as one of unworldly usefulness to mankind. This is our great object in painting,…’ xix

An invitation must have ensued, for the two artists moved from Botley to the Combe’s home and the Clarendon Press offices in Oxford in the late summer and autumn, whilst Hunt, Stephens and Rossetti went down to Knole, near Sevenoaks in Kent, to paint ‘real girls under real trees’. xx Whilst Millais worked on Mariana (Tate Britain) in Oxford, Collins worked slowly on his Convent Thoughts, which was originally conceived as an illustration to Shelley’s poem The Sensitive Plant. Although the painting started out secular, like the poem, Collins changed the figure in the foreground to a nun and the picture became ‘probably the last picture by an associate of Rossetti to follow his ideas of modern, didactic, Christian art', as Alastair Grieve puts it. xxi Both Mariana and Convent Thoughts are about seclusion, the former by abandonment and the latter by choice. Convent Thoughts became one of the most famous Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and was certainly Collins’s best known. xxii The backgrounds of both the Millais and the Collins were painted from Combe’s garden, and Combe recalled that it took Collins an entire day to paint one lily. xxiii This was hardcore Ruskinian observation – Rossetti, less conscientious, had not hesitated to use an artificial lily for his Annunciation.

This was the time of the most brotherly relations between Collins and Millais, so much so that Millais nicknamed his friend ‘Fra Carlo’. Whilst staying with the Combes, Millais and Collins painted companion pictures: Millais a portrait of Thomas Combe, and Collins that of Mrs. Combe’s uncle, William Bennet (Fig. 7). xxiv Among the topics of conversation were Anglican religious communities, mercilessly lampooned by Punch in 1850, p 163, in an article entitled The Convent of the Belgravians:

‘It is proposed to found a Convent, on Anglican principles, under the above title. The vulgar, who think that a minority is necessarily a sect, will, of course, call it a Puseyite Nunnery: that cannot be helped. [then a series of jokey rules for the Convent were set out] …That the Anglican Convent, thus constituted, will lead to “perversions” there is no fear. Alas! the hard multitude will rather say that the Puseyite sisters are only playing at Roman Catholics, and the vile punster will remark that the Convent is more a Monkey-ry than a Nunnery.’

Millais wrote to Mrs. Combe after their return to London: ‘Get the Early Christian [Millais’s nickname for Thomas Combe], in his idle moments, to design the monastery and draw up the rules…’ xxv and Collins left behind a doodle, now in Mrs. Combe’s scrapbook at the Ashmolean Museum, headed ’Celibacy’: Clearly modelled on the Punch article, it is a timetable and

Figure 7. Charles Allston Collins, Thomas Combe Seated at a Table Reading Aloud to William Bennet, Martha plan for a school with 50 pupils, with each friend miscast - Millais as cook, Hunt Combe, Millais and Collins, sketch from the scrapbook of Mrs. Combe, 1850, © Ashmolean Museum, in charge of ‘vice’, Rossetti as secretary and Collins as President. There are University of Oxford cartoons of Hunt, Collins and Millais, and one of a master behind a female pupil at an easel (Fig. 8).

6 On their return to London in November, Millais wrote to Mrs. Combe:

‘The Clarendonian visit, the Bottleyonian privations, and Oxonian martyrdoms xxvi have wrought in us (Collins and myself) such a similar feeling that it is quite impracticable to separate.’ xxvii

BROTHERHOOD AND LOVE IN LONDON, AUTUMN 1850

Whilst at the Clarendon Press, Millais and Collins made matching portrait drawings of each other that they gave to Combe (Ashmolean Museum), a testament to their intense friendship (Figs. 9 & 10). Each drawing bears the initials ‘PRB’ under the signature. Collins had not been a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, but Millais frequently sent Collins’s ‘brotherly remembrances’ to Hunt when writing, and it was clear that the three of them, at least, considered Collins ‘P.R.B.’.

As Collins’s and Millais’s friendship strengthened, after only two years the original Brotherhood was already showing signs of fracture: F.G. Stephens claimed to have destroyed all his paintings later that year, whilst even then Hunt, Rossetti, and Millais were developing in divergent ways. xxviii In the summer of 1850 one of the original seven, James Collinson, created a vacancy by reverting to Roman Catholicism and resigning from the Brotherhood in the wake of the accusations of blasphemy against Millais’s Christ in the House of his Parents, writing pointedly to Rossetti that he felt unable ‘conscientiously as a Catholic to assist in parading the artistic opinions of those who are not.’ xxix In the autumn, Millais suggested Collins for membership in Collinson's place; Hunt, Stephens and Rossetti supported the proposal, but Woolner and William Rossetti were strongly opposed. On November 5, just about the time of Millais’s and Collins’s return to London from Oxford, William Rossetti wrote that

‘…a letter has been received from Millais, urging the admission of Collins into the P.R.B.; that Hunt acquiesces in Millais’s suggestion, Stephens in Hunt’s consent, and Gabriel in that of them two. Woolner himself fought the point savagely, being of opinion (in which I fully agree with him) that Collins has not established a claim to P.R.B.-hood, and that the connexion would not be likely to promote the intimate friendly relations necessary bet[ween] all P.R.B.s.’ xxx

Four were in favour and two against, but in the absence of unanimity Collins's election failed. The real reasons are hard to discern; what is certain is that the two votes against, Woolner and William Rossetti, were both outspoken agnostics, and that Collins was a devout Christian. Hunt recalled later discussing the matter with Millais, and deciding that the Brotherhood was drifting:

‘One objection to Collins was that none of the sleeping members knew him, but they suspected he was very much of a conventional man who would be out of his element with us’. "But you see he is as good a little chap as ever lived, with no nonsense about him, except perhaps his new inclination to confession and fasting,” said Millais, “yet he does not let strangers see his asceticism, which is only the result of his being hipped in love.” “Yes,” I returned, “…The real conclusion that I am driven to is, that we must let the nominal Body Figure 8. Celibacy, a sketched idea for a school or religious community by Collins, from the scrapbook of Mrs. Combe, 1850, © Ashmolean Museum, University of [‘The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’] drift, and while we are working we must hope that true Oxford men will collect, and with these we may make a genuine artistic brotherhood, if discreetly chosen. Collins is happier, I think, in being left for this future combination rather than he

Figure 9. Charles Allston Collins, John Everett Millais, 1850, pencil on paper, 6 1/2 x 5 in, © Figure 10. Sir John Everett Millais, Charles Allston Collins, 1850, graphite on paper, 6 1/2 x Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford 5 in, © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

8 would be in Collinson’s place. His ‘Berengaria’ and, still more, his ‘Convent Thoughts,’ with all their oversights, place him at once on a higher level in manipulation than other outsiders.”' xxxi

Nonetheless the decision ‘cut Collins to the quick’ xxxii, and although he remained a Brother in all but name, he remained proudly aloof, even when a few months later the exhibition of his Convent Thoughts at the Academy made the group think again:

‘Collins exhibits… Convent Thoughts - very charming indeed - a strong claim to P.R.B.-hood, which it appears, however, he is now in no hurry to apply for, thinking it should have been offered long ago.’ xxxiii

At about this time in 1850, Collins suffered another rejection, this time in love. Hunt remembered Millais saying:

‘“In some ways,” …“the good fellow has the unflinching resolve of the conductor of a storming party. When he left Oxford he got hipped about a fancied love affair, and becoming a High Churchman, changed the subject of his picture from being an illustration of the lady in Shelley’s Sensitive Plant, Who out of the cups of the heavy flowers Emptied the rain of the thunder showers, to a picture of a nun with a missal in her hand, studying the significance of the passion flower, with the title ‘Convent Thoughts’. He can act on sudden resolve, and yet withal he is as fearful as a mouse. He ought to be made to get over such folly.”’ xxxiv

The ‘fancied love affair’ which Collins ‘got hipped about’ was with Rossetti’s sister Maria - nicknamed ‘Moony’ by her family for her round face - who worked as a teacher and a governess (notably to Lucy Madox Brown, whom W.M. Rossetti eventually married) (Fig. 11). Quiet and thoughtful, she had a sunny disposition, and was very devout. She must have seemed a good match to Collins, and his feelings seemed reciprocated at first, xxxv but in 1850 (around the same time as the failure of her sister Christina’s engagement to James Collinson), Maria finally made her feelings clear – she preferred the company of Christ to that of Collins. xxxvi It may account for Collins’s changing the figure in Convent Thoughts to a nun.

After this double rejection, for the time being at least, Millais and Collins grew closer. Millais and Hunt must have tried to cheer him up, because W.M. Rossetti mentions having met Millais on Saturday 7th of December 1850, ‘…parading Tottenham Court Road, together with Hunt and Collins, on the search for models….’ xxxvii

Collins lost himself in work the spring of 1851. He was still working on Convent Thoughts in January, and needed to get it ready to for the Academy by early April. In addition, he had begun a new painting - The Devout Childhood of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, but only Covent Thoughts made it to the Exhibition.

THE ACADEMY OF 1851

Hunt wrote:

‘No sooner had the Exhibition opened than we found that the storm of abuse of last year was now turned into a hurricane.’ xxxviii

The critics kept their worst for three new Pre-Raphaelite paintings, Collins’s Convent Thoughts, Millais’s Mariana and Figure 11. Maria Rossetti, shortly after becoming an Hunt’s Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus. All three were originally secular subjects and from poets – Shelley Anglican nun in 1873, the year that Collins (originally), Tennyson and Shakespeare respectively, but, like the year before, it was the religious subjects that most died. Illustrated in Rossetti, WM. Some Reminiscences, offended. The most overtly so, Convent Thoughts, therefore came in for particular abuse. The critic of the Times wrote: London: Langham, 1906, vol 2, facing p 427

'… the authors of these offensive and absurd productions have contrived to combine the puerility or infancy of their art with the uppishness and self-sufficiency of a different period of life. That morbid infatuation which sacrifices truth, beauty, and genuine feeling to mere eccentricity, deserves no quarter at the hands of the public; and ... these monkish follies have no ... real claim to figure in any decent collection of English paintings.’ xxxix

The only other religious painting by a Pre-Raphaelite at the Academy in 1851 was Millais’ The Return of the Dove to the Ark (Ashmolean Museum), which they had heard Ruskin was interested in buying. xl Enboldened, the Pre-Raphaelites approached Ruskin through Coventry Patmore to come to their support, resulting in his famous letter in their defense to the Times ten days later:

'They intend to return to early days in this one point only—that, as far as in them lies, they will draw either what they see, or what they suppose might have been the actual facts of the scene they desire to represent, irrespective of any conventional rules of picture making; and they have chosen their unfortunate though not inaccurate name because all artists did this before Raphael's time, and after Raphael's time did not this, but sought to paint fair pictures rather than represent stern facts, of which the consequence has been that from Raphael's time to this day historical art has been in acknowledged decadence.’ xli

However he qualified his remarks thus:

'No one who has met with any of my writings will suspect me of daring to encourage them in their Romanist and Tractarian tendencies. I am glad to see that Mr. Millais's lady in blue is heartily tired of her painted window and idolatrous toilet-table, and I have no particular respect for Mr. Collins' lady in white, because her sympathies are limited by a dead wall…’ [but as a] ‘botanical study’… ‘I heartily wish that it were mine.’ xlii

The endorsement of Ruskin, the influential critic (Hunt called him the ‘art-Warwick’, a reference to Warwick the Kingmaker xliii ), was enough to make the young Pre-Raphaelites as represented by Millais (22), Hunt (24) and Collins (23) very famous. Ruskin’s letter also pointed them away from ‘the distortions and abstractions of the early medievalising works’ xliv and towards painting truthfully from nature. It was good advice, but would all of them take it?

TO SURREY, SUMMER AND AUTUMN OF 1851

After the Academy, in June 1851 Hunt and Millais went down to Kingston in Surrey on a day trip to scout for locations. They returned to stay in a rented house on Surbiton Hill, and Collins joined them shortly afterwards. A few weeks later they moved to Worcester Park Farm, about halfway between Kingston Station (now Surbiton Station) and the houses of Hunt’s uncle and Millais’s old Jersey friends the Lemprières, who were close neighbours at Ewell. Worcester Park Farm was exactly between Ewell Court Farm to the south, where Hunt was painting The Hireling Shepherd, and Six Acre Meadow on the Hogsmill River to the north, where Millais was painting Ophelia. xlv The summer and autumn of this year are the most documented months of their lives, thanks to the diary that Millais briefly kept over the period, and his letters, published by his son John Guille Millais, and Hunt’s memoirs. These last were written forty years after the events they describe, and although Hunt had a famous memory, there is an agenda of self-promotion and they were carefully edited by his wife Edith. xlvi

The three artists worked hard:

‘From ten in the morning till dark the artists saw little of each other, but when the evenings “brought all things home” they assembled to talk deeply on Art, drink strong tea, and discuss and criticise each other’s pictures.’ xlvii

Collins’s double rejection in love and in art had come at about the same time in the autumn of 1850, and the carefree young man who so happily trawled Tottenham Court Road for ‘stunners’ with his friends had become increasingly monkish, introverted and uncommunicative. Cracks in his close relationship with Millais were beginning to appear, and Millais wrote to Mrs. Combe:

‘We all three live together as happily as ancient monastic brethren. Charley [Collins] has immensely altered, scarcely indulging in an observation. I believe he inwardly thinks that carefulness of himself is better for his soul. Outwardly it goes far to destroy his society, which now, when it happens that I am alone with him, is intolerably unsympathetic.’ xlviii

At about this time Millais started calling Collins ’Saint Carlo’ instead of ‘Fra Carlo’, and began to tease him about his new asceticism:

‘In the evening, when the three friends were gathered together, poor Charlie Collins came in for more “chaff” than his sensitive nature could stand. He had refused some blackberry tart which had been served at dinner, and Millais, knowing that he was very fond of this dish, ridiculed his “mortifying the flesh” and becoming so much of an ascetic. It was bad for him, he said, and his health was suffering in consequence; to which he humorously added, that he thought Collins kept a whip upstairs and indulged in private flagellations. At last Collins retreated to his room, and Millais, turning to Hunt, who had been quietly sketching the while, said, “Why didn’t you back me up? You know these unhealthy views on religion are very bad for him. We must try and get him out of them.” “I intend to leave them alone,” replied the peaceful Hunt; “there’s no necessity for us to copy him.” A pause.’ xlix

Collins explained himself to Hunt:

‘We chatted on till Charley gained breath and composure. “Now I want you to tell me about Wilkie and the other great artists,” I said, “Turner, Stoddard, Constable, Etty, and their like, whom you had, to me, the inconceivable luck of knowing in your earliest days.” “Will it seem perversity to say that I think you were more to be envied than I?” said he. “You looked upon these men as lights in a distant temple that you were striving to reach, You saw the peril of becoming one of those who faint by the way, and you were prepared to encounter obstacles; you put out all your strength to arrive at the desired goal. In doing this you were forced to tread new ground, and you acquired the habit of doing so. The difference with me was that I was already enjoying the brightness and glory of the haven where the crowned ones were resting, talking of the race they had run as only part of their youth. I was dandled on their knees. I took to drawing from mere habit, and they all applauded my efforts. I looked upon the diadem as a part of manhood that must come, and now I begin to doubt and fear the issue.”' l

Wilkie Collins visited, and Hunt recalled that he too was worried:

‘…his immediate concern was in his brother’s recent inclination to extreme Church discipline and rigorous self-denial in matters of fasting and calendar observances, which in Wilkie’s mind could only be prejudicial to health and to the due exercise of his ability. He charged us not to be too persistent in our comments upon the eccentricity, believing that, if left alone, Charley would not long persevere in his new course’. li

Unfortunately, Wilkie hoped in vain for his brother to grow out of his monkish behaviour, and Collins only became more obsessive and withdrawn. Hunt had an understanding of how serious Collins’s crisis was:

‘Changes in his views of life and art were part of a nature which yielded itself to the sway of the current, and he only ultimately found out how this had led him into unanticipated perplexities’. lii

Collins’s work stagnated in Surrey in the autumn of 1851. Just as his friends were working with single-minded, inspired purpose as never before or since, Collins painstakingly painted a background of a shed, that he was teased he would never finish liii (in fact he did eventually, two and a half years later, for the Academy of 1854). Meanwhile, Millais painted the background of Ophelia (Tate Britain). Hunt, who had been finishing The Hireling Shepherd (Manchester Art Gallery), told Millais of his plan for The Light of the World (Keble College, Oxford) one evening after Collins had gone to bed. Millais exclaimed: ‘What a noble subject... I’ll at once make a companion design…’ and Hunt had to ask him not to, causing Millais to withdraw hastily. liv

On their return to London, Millais wrote to Mr. Combe, who had evidently sensed that something was amiss between his two young friends:

‘I saw Charley last night. He is just the same as ever — so provokingly quiet. I fancy you have rather mis-taken my feelings towards him; not a whit of our friendship has diminished. I was with him last night, but little or nothing he said.’ lv

Their stay in Surrey was a remarkable time for all three men. Looking back, Hunt wrote

‘Never did we live again together in such daily spirit-stirring emulation.’ lvi

11 MILLAIS MOVES ON, 1852 TO 1856

The friendship between Millais and Collins, cooling in Surrey, was frozen by the autumn of 1852, although the two habitually continued to see much of one another: Millais wrote to Hunt, finding London

‘…tremendously dull … and I have positively no person except Charles Collins (who is frightfully chilling) to associate with. I really don’t know what to do sometimes. I turn off to Hanover Crescent [chez Collins] merely because it is an object, jest with the old lady [Mrs. Collins], say about a dozen words to her lay figure son, and tumble out into the freezing night miserable.’ lvii

Much had changed. In January 1853, William Michael Rossetti wrote triumphantly in the Pre-Raphaelite Journal:

‘Our position is greatly altered. We have emerged from reckless abuse to a position of general and high recognition just so much qualified by adverse criticism as suffices to keep our once would-be annihilators in countenance. I limit myself to the briefest recapitulation of last year’s public doings, and our present state.’ lviii

Although Collins was part of the general triumph, it must have been hard for him, born in the heart of the artistic establishment and with a sense of entitlement to his place in it, to witness the meteoric rise of Millais, who in 1853 at the age of only 24 was made an Associate of the Royal Academy. In other ways, too, more personal, Millais had outgrown his friend, for he fell in love with Mrs. Ruskin in the summer of 1853. If anything, Collins became still more religious. His only Academy picture that year was a subject from John Keble, ‘Thou who has given me eyes to see, etc.’ (now lost). lix At Christmas 1853, still teasing his friend to the point of persecution, Millais drew a cartoon at the end of a letter to Mrs. Collins, of her in the pose of St. Elizabeth imploring ‘Saint Carlo’ to have some Christmas pudding, as he sits aloof and haloed at an easel painting the picture, missal at his feet, with his brother Wilkie advancing as the devil behind (Fig. 12). lx

In January 1854 Hunt left for the East where he remained for two years; Collins corresponded with him regularly. Hunt sent in two major paintings to the R.A. that year, his The Light of the World, and The Awakening Conscience (Tate Gallery). Collins’s only picture for the Academy that year was the ‘shed’ background he had been labouring over in Surrey two and a half years before, at last worked up into another religious painting, A Thought of Bethlehem, lxi which attracted little notice. lxii In spite of being out- gunned by Hunt at the Academy, Collins was still one of the rebel leaders in the eyes of the critics, whilst Millais had joined the establishment: ‘Mr. Holman Hunt and Collins are left to sustain the reputation of the Pre-Raphaelites, unaided by their powerful colleague Millais, now an Associate of the Academy.’ lxiii

Meanwhile, Effie Ruskin had left her husband. Millais had not seen her since Glenfinlas the previous year, and would not for a while yet. Collins went with Millais to Scotland for a walking tour at the end of May of 1854 until early July. lxiv Another artist, John Dalbiac Luard, two years younger than Millais, was with them:

Figure 12. Sir John Everett Millais, cartoon of Collins (‘Saint Carlo’) painting 'Millais became more and more attached to Luard during their stay [in Scotland in 1854]. Luard would St. Elizabeth…, with his mother posing and his brother as ‘ye foul fiend’ cheerfully clean Millais’s palette and brushes for him and read aloud to him Ruskin’s Edinburgh Lectures!' beyond), 1853, pen and ink, 8 x 6 3/4 in, © Huntington Library lxv

12 Millais was finding Collins less and less amenable, but it was handy to have a place to stay in London. In the winter Millais had given up Gower Street and was probably staying with the Collins’s in Hanover Terrace whilst he at last finished his burdensome portrait of Ruskin. In what must have been a very awkward moment, he showed it to the sitter there before it was shipped to Ruskin’s house in Denmark Hill. lxvi After Christmas, Ruskin’s father wrote Collins an extraordinary letter that began: ‘As the confident [sic] between Mr Millais and my son I trouble you with this - …’. It is full of bitter recriminations against Millais, and reveals that Collins attempted in vain to act as a broker for peace between Ruskin Jnr. and Millais. lxvii

Millais set out from Hanover Terrace in February 1855 to Perth to see Effie, who was at last legally free of Ruskin. lxviii On his return to London, stricken with ‘flu, Millais had to work frantically hard to finish his first exhibited modern life subject, of an heroic fireman, The Rescue (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne). To the last minute, he was at it for 36 hours straight before the van arrived to take it to the Royal Academy; faithful Collins helped by painting the hose. Collins showed his own modern life subject that year - The Good Harvest of '54 (Fig. 13). In the 1850s there were several bumper harvests, as abundant as those of ‘the hungry forties’ had been meagre. It is not an ambitious painting, small, of a conventionally pretty girl at another closed oak door, holding a sheaf of corn, against the backdrop of an ivy-clad brick wall very similar to the wall in Millais’s The Huguenot of 1852, but it is a lovely painting. Both Millais’s and Collins’s pictures were badly hung at the Academy, but unlike Millais, who made a fuss and got his picture rehung advantageously, Collins allowed his picture to languish ‘skied’ in the little Octagon Room lxix, lost amongst among many other small paintings. Ruskin was one of the few who noticed it:

‘There is much careful painting in this little study, and it was a wicked thing to put it into a room in which, while its modest subject could draw no attention, its good painting was of necessity utterly invisible.’ lxx

In April 1855, Michael Halliday, an artist friend of Millais and Hunt from Surrey, wrote to Hunt that Collins was apparently fasting, and ‘looked like a half-starved ghost.’ lxxi Collins continued to believe Millais ‘a second Revelation’, lxxii but his hero-worship after Millais was married, as he was on July 5th 1855, could not continue. After a brief Scottish honeymoon, Mr. and Mrs. Millais moved into Annat Lodge, Perth, and, as J.G. Millais wrote:

‘Among their first visitors was Charles Collins. He, however, was not bent on amusing himself; he wanted to paint, and at his request my mother sat for him every day for a fortnight. Then, seeing that the picture made very slow progress, and that she was presented as looking out of the window of a railway carriage [sic] - a setting that would've vulgarised Venus herself - she refused to sit any longer, and the picture was never finished.’ lxxiii

Collins had remained the same, but Millais’s world had expanded, and the cosy companionship of previous years was gone forever. A throwaway remark of Millais’s to Thomas Combe back in Oxford in 1850 comes to mind:

‘People had better buy my pictures now, when I am working for fame, than a few years later, when I shall be married and working for a wife and children.’ lxxiv

Figure 13. Charles Allston Collins, The Good Harvest of 1854, oil on canvas, 1854, 17 1/4 x 13 3/4 in, © The Victoria and Albert Museum, London

13 Whereas Collins was still as religiously motivated in 1855 as he had been in 1850. lxxv He had, however, been alerted by Millais to the popularity of modern subjects: the painting that had so occupied Collins and bored Effie Millais in Scotland was one he had been working on for a year already, his most ambitious so far, intended for the Academy of 1856: The Electric Telegraph (now lost, if it was ever finished), in which a wife tries to get news of her husband, believed involved in a railway accident, by the means of the telegraph. The telegraph seemed a miraculous invention (in 1855, work had begun laying the first trans- Atlantic cable), and, as he wrote to Hunt in February 1855, Collins hoped that the picture would cast him anew as a modern artist:

‘… surely the instrument which does… a thousand… marvels, setting time and distance at defiance is a thing to glory in. This, and the lighting of this town by gas, and our railways and machinery are the natural production of the nineteenth century mind just as the [cathedrals] so justly admired were of the thirteenth, and it is worse than useless to ignore these colossal achievements of our own day and try to force back the stream to its source again an experiment the pitiable results of which there are abundant opportunities of judging of in every cheap new Gothic structure which is added to the list of London edifices.’ lxxvi

This was a huge step forward for Collins and a far cry from the medievalising religious subjects of previous years. He researched it thoroughly, visiting different railway stations and sending himself telegrams, and taking careful notes of the process. As Hunt had done for The Light of the World, he even physically constructed the scene in his studio. He found actually painting it increasingly hard going, however, describing to Hunt:

‘the extreme suffering and anxiety which painting causes me and which I never have found so wearing and torturing as in what I am at this time engaged in.’ lxxvii

Amongst the group of 18 drawings by Collins that the British Museum bought from Fairfax Murray in 1891, who had them from Wilkie Collins, are four irresolute sketches, each a different idea for the composition. Together they form a terrible record of Collins’s struggles with the picture (Fig. 14).lxxviii In the end the project was too much for him and he failed to finish the picture in time to send in to the Academy; this in the year that Millais became ‘the most influential painter at work in England.’ lxxix Collins’s personal crisis broke at last; it took the form of a momentous and lengthy letter he wrote Hunt on the 22nd April 1856, annotated (by Hunt) ‘Charley Collins Apology for his Art under a deep sense of high minded responsibility.’ lxxx It was written from a new address in Percy Street, as apparently he had at last moved out of his mother’s house in nearby Hanover Terrace. He wrote of his difficulties finishing The Electric Telegraph in time to send in to Figure 14. Charles Allston Collins, study for The Electric Telegraph, (AKA The the Academy, and his increasing feeling that he was generally too reliant on Millais’s advice, and that the Railway Accident), 1856, pencil on paper, 10 x 7 3/4 in, © Trustees of the British Museum picture in particular was too similar to Millais’s The Order of Release. For Collins these were deep-rooted issues that went a long way back:

‘I shall not forget that I have suffered in having my name associated with the picture of Convent Thoughts and in receiving praise for it. The idea and treatment of it having been suggested by Millais’ lxxxi

These thoughts, he wrote, ‘… at last after months of struggling were too much for me. They seemed to strike the brushes from my hand.’ lxxxii This obsessive letter, more of an essay at nearly 2,300 words, mentions the name of Millais 23 times, and the prose is desperate. Collins never painted again.

14 A NEW CAREER, NEW LOVE, AND EARLY DEATH

Collins was ‘cradled in art, and adopted it as a profession, his very familiarity with it causing him to underestimate its technical difficulties, so that, in the result, he abandoned art for literature’ wrote J. Ernest Pythian in 1910. lxxxiii Collins set out on a new career as a writer. Most of his published work appeared in Dickens's All the Year Round, including his first book, The New Sentimental Journey (1859) comprising sketches of his Parisian visits, which was published in parts in 1859. This was followed by another anthology, The Eye Witness and his Evidence of many Wonderful Things in 1860. A Cruise upon Wheels: The Chronicle of Some Autumn Wanderings Among the Deserted Post-roads of France was published in 1862. He wrote three novels: The Bar Sinister: a Tale (1864), Strathcairn (1864), and At the Bar: a Tale (1866). Wilkie Collins, writing his brother's entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, believed that Charles's prose writings showed ‘rare ability in the presentation of character … gave promise of achievement in the future, never destined to be fulfilled’. He as was eclipsed in writing by the astonishing success of his brother (whose Woman in White ran to seven editions in 1860 alone) as he had been in painting by his metaphorical brother Millais. Now, as a writer, Collins attached himself to another strong character, William Thackeray, who was his neighbour in London and became a close friend until the older man’s death only a few years later in 1863.

Ford Madox Brown had written to Hunt in September 1855 that ‘Collins has I believe received peremptory orders to marry himself forthwith and is I suppose going to do so.’ lxxxiv These orders, presumably from Millais, were carried out in 1860, when Collins married Kate Dickens, the daughter of Charles Dickens, who was an old family friend, particularly of Wilkie’s (Fig. 15). The union was childless, and Kate’s biographer has suggested that she had an affair with Val Prinsep during it. lxxxv G. H. Fleming, biographer of Millais, bluntly suggested the reason: ‘Charles Collins was incurably impotent.’ lxxxvi Millais knew Kate Dickens well and had liked her since she sat to him just before the wedding, for The Black Brunswicker. Fleming speculated that, after Millais’s experiences with Effie and Ruskin, it must have been hard for Millais to watch history repeat itself with Kate and Collins, and that this was the reason that he did not attend the wedding of his closest and oldest friend. Hunt was Collins’s best man. For much of the marriage Collins was an invalid, suffering dreadfully from the cancer of the stomach that killed him in April 1873 at the young age of 46. His obituarist in the Graphic, May 3, 1873 described his illness as ‘ulceration of the stomach’. In fact he had suffered from it for most of his life; Millais wrote to John Leech from their walking tour in Scotland in 1854:

'The first day we walked 20 miles, second 26 and the third 13 - dreadful quantities of rain of course. The furthest locality we went to was Fort William... On one occasion poor little Collins was tottering along with his hands apparently holding up his hundred and odd yards of bowels, doubled up like an old man from abdominal pains, the inspecting audience gave expression of ironical Gallic, maybe they were offended at my bearing the luggage of both on my manly shoulders which I did in consideration of my companions state.' lxxxvii

It is quite possible that he was suffering from a bad stomach as early as the autumn of 1851 whilst they were staying together in Surrey, when Millais was teasing him mercilessly about his abstinence from rich pudding.

Kate received proposals of marriage promptly after Collins’s death from both Prinsep and Fred Walker; they were refused and in September 1873 she married Carlo Perugini - whom she had met at Leighton’s house - in a secret ceremony, followed the next year by a public wedding. In the interim, Kate placed all her and her late husband’s possessions into storage at the Pantechnicon, London, which burnt to the ground in February 1874. The fire Figure 15. In the Porch at Gad’s Hill Place, photograph by presumably destroyed most of Charles Collins’s and Kate’s paintings, and much of their correspondence including Mason & Co. L-R: H.F. Chorley, Kate Dickens, Mamie Dickens, all of Kate’s letters from her father Charles Dickens. It is probably the reason why there are so few letters to Collins, Charles Dickens, C.A. Collins, and Georgina Hogarth. or paintings by him, in existence today. Reproduced in The Life of Dickens by John Forster (London: Chapman & Hall, 1911)

EPITAPHS

Comparing him with Millais, Hunt wrote

‘… one fated to win honours, whatever the obstructions may be, the other, [in] spite of original gifts and strenuous yearnings, doomed to be turned back on the threshold of success by want of courageous confidence.’ lxxxviii

Collins actually colluded in this version of history; in 1865, Hunt sent him the manuscript of a pamphlet on the symbolism in his The Light of the World that he published later that year, for editing. lxxxix His reply is revealing:

‘Thank you a thousand times, my dear old friend, for your thought of linking honourably my name with yours and Millais’ in that mention of our wondrous life in the Surrey Farm House. I have, however, as you will see, put my pencil through each such allusion, feeling convinced that it is much better that my art career should not be spoken of while I am striving – and just now very hard – to succeed in another way. Such success once achieved - supposing such a consummation possible – I should not feel as I do, but till that is done I cannot help thinking that all things connected with those old unhappy art-wrestlings is better left without mention.’ xc

Despite the later contempt of Millais, and despite revisionist versions of history propagated by Hunt, and indeed despite Collins’s own best efforts to efface himself, the letters, diaries and in the critical opinion of the time show that he was intimately associated with the mainstream of Pre-Raphaelite development from at least 1850. He became one of the foremost champions and practitioners of Pre-Raphaelitism and at one time he represented in the eyes of the public of the time fully one third of the Brotherhood. He is hardly a household name like his friends (or his brother and father in law), and, like the other Pre-Raphaelites, he was subordinate in painting to Millais, and in intellect to Hunt, but their lives were inextricably linked to his. He has left behind a few highly accomplished Pre-Raphaelite religious paintings, including Convent Thoughts and the lovely St Elizabeth…, which show him to be a better painter than Collinson, Deverell or Stephens. We do not have to agree with his low opinion of himself.

When Hunt heard the news of Collins’s passing he hastened to his deathbed. He wrote

‘For the last few years he had not touched a brush, being entirely disenchanted with the pursuit of painting; yet his delicacy of handling and his rendering of tone and tint had been exquisite. Certain errors of proportion marred his picture “Convent Thoughts,” or it would have been a typical work of unforgettable account despite its puerile leading idea. At the time of the vacancy in our Brotherhood occasioned by the retirement of Collinson, I judged him to be the strongest candidate as to workmanship, and certainly he could well have held the field for us had he done himself justice in his design and possessed courage to keep to his purpose. In his last artistic struggle Collins continually lost heart when any painting had progressed half-way towards completion, abandoning it for a new subject, and this vacillation he indulged until he had a dozen or more relinquished canvases on hand never to be completed.’ xci

Hunt drew Collins after death (after Hunt, the drawing passed to Wilkie Collins and is now in the Birmingham Gallery Museums Trust). He inscribed the drawing with a poignant quotation from Collins’s own A New Sentimental Journey of 1859, his first published work written after he gave up painting. It serves aptly as Collins’s own epitaph (Fig. 16):

‘It is a pleasant thought, at any rate; for surely of all the ingredients in the horror which death inspires, there is not one that has a larger share to make it terrible than the bitter thought that we are forgotten * * * * * Think of this sometimes; and go, once, now and then, and stand beside his grave. You shall not come away the worse.’

Figure 16. William Holman Hunt, Charles Allston Collins – a Deathbed Portrait, 1873, 20” x 28”. © Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery

Figure 1. Charles Allston Collins, The Devout Childhood of St Elizabeth of Hungary, 1851-52, Figure 17. Sir John Everett Millais, The Return of the Dove to the Ark, 1851, oil on canvas, oil on canvas, 35 3/4 x 23 3/4 in, Maas Gallery, London, © Maas Gallery 34 3/4 x 21 1/5 in, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, © Ashmolean Museum, University ofOxford.

18 The Devout Childhood of St Elizabeth of Hungary The painting is signed and dated 1852

Fig. 17 The triptych as planned for Combe: Collins, St Elizabeth, representing Faith; Hunt, A Converted British Family representing Charity; Millais, The Return of the Dove to the Ark representing Hope.

COMPANION PICTURES, SPRING 1851

On February 10th, 1851, Millais wrote to Mrs. Combe: ‘I see Charley every night, and we dine alternate Sundays at each other’s houses’. xcii This was the time of the two friends’ closest relationship, and Millais’s next project was for them both to paint religious subjects aimed at Combe, in a scheme which Millais had been hatching throughout the autumn of the year before. Whilst staying at the Clarendon Press in September 1850, Millais had written triumphantly to Hunt that he had clinched a deal over his friend’s A Converted British Family… 'Allow me to congratulate you on the sale of your picture. I have sold it for you for 150 guineas. I could not get more - I have induced a friend of Mr Combe to purchase it and present it to Mr C.’ xciii The ‘friend’ was Mrs. Combe’s uncle William Bennet, who had been staying with the Combes for some while. The cheque that Hunt was sent on the 27th of September, however, was signed by Combe, not Bennet; the explanation, suggested by Hunt, xciv was that Combe found Bennet over generous and they had quarrelled. From Bennet’s will it appears that he may have wished to settle some money upon his niece, coincidentally about £150, and that the purchase of the painting was proposed by him as an elegant way of doing so, xcv an idea which may not have been entirely well received by Thomas Combe, the ‘Early Christian’ as the Pre-Raphaelites called him. Howsoever, Combe ended up with the painting, and as an art dealer, I have to admire Millais’s skill in exploiting the situation. Millais wrote again to Hunt in October that 'Every day your picture gains upon the purchaser and possessor. I assure you that it hangs in a very beautiful room - no paper but painted pure white: all round the top are hung shields with arms painted thereon, all done by Mr. Combe’ xcvi Millais had further plans for this room. He wrote that Combe was ‘…determined to purchase a picture of each of us [the P.R.B.] - at my instigation, he will take an early opportunity to dispose of the David Cox [of whom Martha Combe had been a pupil]. I wish you could let me know what Rossetti is painting, the size and likely cost, also Stephens: this year we must all sell.’ xcvii In the event, the next picture that Combe bought was Millais’s The Return of the Dove to the Ark, to hang to one side of his Hunt (Figs. 1 & 17).xcviii It was exhibited at the Royal Academy of 1851. A letter from Millais to Mrs. Combe, written on April 15, after sending in to the R.A., reveals what Millais originally planned to hang the other side: ‘It was very unfortunate that Charley could not complete the second picture for the Exhibition. I tried all the encouraging persuasions in my power; but he was beaten by a silk dress, which he had not yet finished.’ xcix

19 Only one painting by Collins matches the description of a ‘silk dress’: the ‘second picture’ Millais mentions was The Devout Childhood of St. Elizabeth of Hungary. Probably begun in January that year, it had been intended for the Exhibition of 1851 as a companion piece to Millais’s The Return of the Dove…. The leftmost girl in it wears the same dress. The ‘defeat’ that Millais refers to are the difficulties Collins must have encountered painting his dress into a wet white ground, in the Pre-Raphaelite manner as prescribed by Hunt, c to make it shimmer like silk. It was a difficult process to master; for each session both the ground and the paint had to be painstakingly and consistently prepared, and then applied in stages in quantities small enough to avoid drying out too soon in order to achieve a uniform effect. The technique, like true fresco, can leave patches in the paint marking each visit to the canvas - discernible in Collins’s silk dress. The same distinctive patchiness can be seen in the background to Millais’s Ophelia of 1852 (Tate), and (botched) in Ford Madox Brown’s Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet of 1852-6 (Tate). ci Millais avoided trouble with his dress in the Return of the Dove… by making it seem made of coarser stuff, to finish it faster.

Both canvases were supplied by Brown cii and are close in size (the canvas size of St. Elizabeth… is 64mm higher and 34mm wider). The paintings match in shape, with shallow arched top (under the present stepped arch slip of the Return of the Dove…, the original shape may be seen in the paint ciii). Another consideration is that the bespoke frames of both pictures are almost identical, designed by Millais with a repeating leaf and berry pattern. Millais, at the same time as designing the frame for Convent Thoughts, planned the frame for the Dove… with ‘olive leaves, and a dove at each corner holding the branch in its mouth’ civ ; ultimately the frames were made without the corners, probably so that Millais and Collins could share the cost of two frames of one design. cv As late as 10 February 1851 Millais still intended the Return of the Dove… to have Noah in it, and birds and animals in the background, but with only two months to finish the picture in time for the Royal Academy in early April, he simplified the composition to the two figures and the dove, with a plain black background cvi. On a similar timetable with St. Elizabeth…, Collins would not have been able to finish in time for sending in to the Academy at the beginning of April. He simply could not keep up with Millais.

Combe must have thought both paintings would reach the Royal Academy that year right up until Collins’s didn’t. Combe bought the Return of the Dove… before the Exhibition, and only later, disappointed at not being able to buy St. Elizabeth…, after some hesitation and a push from Millais, did he buy Collins’s Convent Thoughts, the Collins picture that did make it to the Royal Academy. cvii The two pictures joined Hunt’s Converted British Family…, already in Combe’s collection. It has since been assumed that Convent Thoughts is the companion to the Return of the Dove…, cviii but it now seems that St. Elizabeth… was the picture that Millais and Collins intended. It has been suggested by Malcolm Warner that they were planned by Millais to be a sort of triptych representing Faith (Collins), Hope (Millais) and Charity (Hunt). cix It is unlikely that Millais wanted Combe to have two pictures by Collins, and St. Elizabeth… is closer to a representation of Faith than Convent Thoughts. It is also of the right colour, by the key provided by Rossetti in the stack of seven books representing the seven virtues in his archetypical Pre-Raphaelite painting (the first to be exhibited with the initials ‘P.R.B.'), The Girlhood of the Mary Virgin of 1848-9 (Tate). The top three books representing the three cx Christian virtues are respectively light brown, for Charity, the same colour as the dress of the girl to the right Figure 18. William Holman Hunt, Study for Light of the World, 1851, of the missionary in Hunt’s A Converted British Family…, turquoise for Faith, the same colour as the dress in (detail) pencil with pen and brown ink on paper, 10 x 14 in, Ashmolean Collins's St. Elisabeth…, and green for Hope, the same colour as the dress of the leftmost girl in The Return Museum, Oxford, © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford of the Dove....

20 Another interesting idea arising from the dating of The Devout Childhood of St. Elizabeth of Hungary to the spring of 1851 is in connection with Holman Hunt: In Surrey in October 1851, Hunt had begun to devise the system of typology that lies under the supernatural imagery of what became his masterpiece, The Light of the World. Jeremy Maas wrote:

‘…the art of constructing typological symbolism, which Hunt had learned from Modern Painters, proved a perfect method of using superbly painted visual details to create a language that could be understood by those who were not content to contemplate the mere paint surface or even only the surface meaning of paintings…. It was a most ingenious method of investing pictures with profundity.’ cxi

Hunt’s development of the symbolism of The Light of the World has often been examined in detail elsewhere. However, it is only now apparent (from Hunt’s preparatory drawing of October 1851 and from the finished painting) that Hunt’s door is the mirror image of the door from Collins’s St. Elizabeth…, painted several months earlier (Fig. 18). Both are of grained and knotted oak, with very similar hinges, and neither door has a handle or a lock. cxii It has oft been proposed (although notably not by the artist himself) that Hunt left the handle off the door in The Light of the World deliberately to suggest that the door was the door to man’s soul, and could only be opened from the inside, to let Christ in (Fig. 19). A slightly different explanation now suggests itself – the absence of handle or lock from the door in Collins’s painting is simply a technical mistake of perspective or a deliberate flattening of the space, to ‘medievalise’ it: Hunt found his friend’s meaningless omission inspiring, and incorporated the idea in his picture.

SAINT ELIZABETH

Elizabeth was an unusual Saint, in that she was an aristocrat (it was said that Prince Albert was descended from her) and a mother who renounced the world. She was born a Hungarian Princess in the thirteenth century, was married at 14, bore three children, was widowed at 20, died at 24 and was canonised soon after; she kneels in prayer at the door of a locked chapel, so pious that she will not wait for it to open. The lines that accompanied the painting at the Royal Academy when it was exhibited in 1852 were from Alban Butler’s Lives of the Saints: when St Elizabeth was a girl, 'If she found the doors of the chapel in the palace shut, not to lose her labour, she knelt down at the threshold, and always put up her petition to the throne of God.’ cxiii The subject does tend to Romanism, as Ruskin put it; Butler, an eighteenth-century English Roman Catholic priest, was one of a long line of hagiographers of the Saint. Two popular miracles associated with St. Elizabeth are referred to in the picture: secretly taking bread to the poor, her future husband asked her to show what she had hidden, she opened her cloak to reveal a vision of roses, and, secondly, when she sheltered a leper in her own bed, her husband pulled back the bedclothes only to see a vision of a crucifix. Collins could instead have chosen to quote from a modern, Anglican life of St. Elizabeth; Charles Kingsley had just published his widely popular Saint's Tragedy (1848). Based on researched ‘facts’, Kingsley’s version emphasised that whilst Elizabeth was a woman of piety and charity, she was also a mother and a woman of the world. It was written to counter miraculous Catholic versions, like Butler’s, and to show that marriage was not incompatible with a life of religious dedication (especially, he had hoped to woo his future wife, Fanny cxiv ). In choosing Butler over Kingsley, Collins made his High Church allegiance apparent.

Millais’s drawing St. Elizabeth of Hungary Washing the feet of Pilgrims (Private Collection) of 1848 is probably the first time the Pre-Raphaelites had treated the subject, cxv but James Collinson’s painting of The Renunciation of Queen Elizabeth of Hungary of 1848-50 was the first to deliberately eschew Kingsley and instead take from a Roman Catholic Figure 19. William Holman Hunt, Light of the World, c. account, in this case Count de Montalembert's Life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary (the English translation by Ambrose Lisle 1851-53, oil on canvas, 48 x 24 in, Keble College, Oxford. Phillips was published in London in 1839, illustrated by Eduard Hauser ). cxvi Collinson chose a scene from late in the By Kind Permission of the Warden and Fellows of Keble Saint’s life, after her marriage and the birth of her children, as she renounced the world for Christ, whereas Charles College, © Oxford University/Bridgeman Images Collins chose to depict the Saint in her girlish purity. cxvii Collins evidently looked at Hauser’s illustrations to Montalembert:

21 his depiction of Saint Elizabeth has the same deliberately harsh perspective and flat, linear style associated with Medieval art. One illustration in particular evidently offered Collins several elements of composition: the architecture of the doorway, the plants in the foreground, the mountains in the background and the dress of the Saint (Fig. 20). Hauser, a convert to Roman Catholicism, had been taught in Rome by the spiritual leader of the Nazarenes, the painter Johann Friedrich Overbeck. cxviii

As Alastair Grieve has pointed out:

'The many Pre-Raphaelite illustrations to the life of St Elizabeth of Hungary, who renounced her important worldly position to follow Christ, may also relate to the contemporary controversy over wealthy girls who were joining sisterhoods. Rossetti, Collinson, Millais and Collins all made illustrations of events in this obscure saint’s life.’ cxix

One controversy was over a young heiress called Augusta Talbot, related to the Earl of Shrewsbury, who it was thought had been kidnapped by a Roman Catholic priest and put into a nunnery in order to appropriate her legacy of £80,000. This provocative story, against the anti-Catholic mood of the nation, caused the Times leader writer of March 26 1851 to write:

‘…a Roman Catholic priest …will feel it is duty [first to consider] the aggrandizement and extension of the interests of his church. …this time his office is to mould to his will the plastic mind and feelings of a young and inexperienced girl …A young girl, who has not attained her nineteenth year, is consigned to the walls of the convent, to be there subjected to an influence against which all her struggles would have been in vain had not assistance come to her from without. …Miss Talbot was cut off from all intercourse with her Protestant relations. She was kept confined within the walls of the convent which was ultimately chosen for a perpetual incarceration. …Shall it be tolerated in England in the middle of the nineteenth century that Roman Catholic priests should slink about the country, …taking advantage of the simplicity of a credulous girl there, with the single and palpable object of securing large sums of money for the aggrandisement of their church?’ cxx

Collins was working on his painting at exactly this time. Figure 20. Eduard Hauser, illustration from Chapter IV We have seen his interest in communities from his of Life of St Elizabeth of Hungary by Count de doodle done at the Combes’s, and his change of subject Montalembert (London, 1839). in Convent Thoughts the year before. His young Saint Figure 21. Charles Allston Collins, The Devout Childhood of St Elizabeth of Hungary, 1852, graphite and ink on paper, 10 3/4 x 7 in, Tate Britain, Elizabeth is wealthy too, by the look of her heavy gold London, © Tate cross and chain and her silk dress, and she also seems to want to enter the church, closed to her.

22 A CLOSER LOOK….

St Elizabeth’s missal lies dropped at the threshold, and a rose, associated with the Saint, clings to the wall, as exquisitely painted and as slight as the girl. A horse-chestnut sapling grows behind the chapel (also seen in the background of Millais’s Ferdinand…), its whorled leaves clustered in groups of seven, suggesting the sacraments. A rich gold cross is about her neck on a gothic chain. She wears an iridescent turquoise robe, and a tasseled red woollen cap, symbolic of her charity, for she span wool to clothe the poor. The path to the door is scattered with shells and pebbles, finely painted. The grass, every blade a single stroke of the brush, is dotted with tiny daisies. The chapel and the doorway is typical of the prevailing taste in Gothic Revival church architecture, and was probably suggested by Hauser, but it also has a faintly suburban feel to it: the capital and columns are like the doorway of an ordinary terraced house in London of about the same date. cxxi The oak door, wonderfully knotted and grained, with rusty hinges, lends a warm background to the brilliant colours of the figure before it. The picture is painted in the Pre-Raphaelite manner with glazes in places so thin that the under-drawing is clearly visible. The skin tones are particularly delicate. The wall of the chapel is lightly toned and modulated. Collins used restrained impasto on the stonework to suggest the roughness of the surface, and thickened his paint elsewhere only to render the chunky gold necklace and the knobbly boards of the missal. Her robe is worked with tiny dabs of different blues and greens, at different thicknesses to allow the white ground to make the garment shimmer.

A wooded landscape, tidily reminiscent of Regent’s Park near where Collins lived, extends to the mountains of the Saint’s native Hungary out into the distance. The addition of the landscape appears to have been made some way into the project, for the grass where the wall had extended (as in the drawing, Tate Britain) is less meticulously painted (Fig. 21). Collins probably made the changes when he took the painting up again in the new year of 1852 to ready it for sending in to the RA in April, cxxii perhaps because of Ruskin’s dislike of the secluding wall of the garden in Convent Thoughts expressed in his letter to the Times the year before.

The ‘missal’ on the step is The Miracles of our Lord, by the illustrator and illuminator Henry Noel Humphreys, published by Longman in 1848. cxxiii It has a distinctive style of binding made of papier mâché that was ‘the most successful of all the ingenuities of Victorian commercial bookbinding… in the ‘monastic style’’’ (Fig. 22).cxxiv Collins took two of the six small medallion reliefs in the binding, and enlarged them, probably because painting all six medallions to the scale of the picture would have made them illegibly small. The subjects of the two enlarged reliefs are the miracles of turning water into wine at the marriage at Cana (left most in the painting, top right on the book) and the miracle of the raising of Lazarus (centre right on the book). He also made the book thicker and changed the edges of the pages from gold to red, chiming across the canvas with the pink of the rose and the carmine of the St. Elizabeth’s cap. To Collins, the book looked like a medieval missal; he had used it before, unaltered, on the floor in the foreground of Berengaria’s Alarm… together with illuminations from inside other books by Humphreys, adapting the original designs for his own use, as he also did for Convent Thoughts. cxxv However, Ruskin thought Humphreys’s papier mâché books ‘vain and useless’. cxxvi Hunt painted another, The Origin and Progress of the Art of Writing (published in 1853), placed on the table of the deliberately tasteless interior of the Awakening Conscience of 1854 (Tate). Figure 22. Cover of The Miracles of Our Lord by Henry Noel Humphreys (London: Longman & Co., 1848)

23 At the end of The Miracles of our Lord is a short essay by Humphreys entitled Remarks of the Illuminator about typography, in which he describes Medieval Christian symbolism:

‘Designated, as this interesting branch of study has often been, by the name of “Romanism,” it is perhaps not difficult to account for the indifference or hostility with which, till lately, it has been viewed…These traditions and Symbols, and the beauties of Art founded upon them, were all emanation, more or less pure, of the great and beautiful truths in which they originated…’

Humphrey’s essay could be a manifesto for Collins’s painting. Collins had a fondness for Keble, in choosing subjects for paintings cxxvii; his reading almost certainly extended to number 89 in Keble’s Tracts for the Times, On the Mysticism attributed to the Early Fathers of the Church. Errington explains:

‘In that century which saw the development of a new scientific critical approach to Biblical exegesis the Tractarians were, on the contrary, attempting to revive the method of interpreting biblical passages which had prevailed amongst the church Fathers in the first centuries of Christianity. …To summarise, the writer claimed that the two Testaments were linked by more than mere historical continuity. What took place relative to Man’s salvation in the New had been prefigured throughout the Old, if the events described there were received in an allegorical as well as a literal sense; and the writer applied the term, type, as a title to any such prophetic indications as he discovered. In searching for types the reader looked, as the church fathers had done, for “tokens of our Lord's Passion, and more especially the Sign of the Cross, in innumerable places of the Old Testament, which neither are so expanded in the New, nor to common eyes betray of themselves any such illusion.” …Nor did the hunt for types cease outside the pages of the Old Testament. The literary symbols so far described came under the heading of historical types, but nature, as Keble pointed out was another kind of revelatory book, and thus the shapes, numbers and substances of almost all God’s works in the natural world referred man in a similar way towards the Passion and the sacraments.’ cxxviii

According to Millais’s brother William, the Return of the Dove… ‘was seen by one scholar as emblematic of the return of Protestant Christians (Millais included) to the Catholic fold.’ cxxix The only way that inference could have been made is by applying Keble’s method; in Tract 89, Keble quoted St. Justin the Martyr ‘…that the mystery of those who were saved by Christ was exhibited at the deluge.’ There were eight people on the ark; on the eighth day Christ rose again, and so that day was also the first ‘of a fresh race of men.’ The ark was made of wood; and ‘wood expresses the mystery of the cross’. cxxx By this way of thinking (and we can be fairly certain that it was Combe’s way of thinking, and Collins’s and Millais’s too), the biblical flood is a type of baptism, or re-birth. St. Elizabeth… too can be interpreted through Keble: The wood of the door, so carefully painted and prominent in the painting, is a type of the cross. From the natural world, the sacraments are implied in the seven clustered leaves of the horse chestnut tree. In conclusion, however, Errington wrote:

‘The hypnotic reality of the Pre-Raphaelites’ scenes is what remains in the mind whereas the features they shared with Catholic medieval revivalism have evaporated and been forgotten.’ cxxxi

ELIZABETH SIDDAL AND THE MYSTERY OF THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE….

Who was the model? The name ‘Elizabeth’ brings to mind Elizabeth Siddal (Fig. 23). Her legendary beauty, her fascinating multiple rôles as model, muse and artist, and the circumstances of her romantic life and tragic death make her a desirable element in a Pre-Raphaelite painting, and any dealer, scholar or collector would like to think that his painting was modelled on her. I am therefore wary of asserting that she sat for Collins in the spring of 1851 and yet there is evidence that she did. Today’s image of Elizabeth Siddal is dominated by Rossetti’s many pictures of her, done after the winter of 1851-2, but from Figure 23. Detail of a photograph by Frederick her discovery by Deverell in a hat shop in December 1849 until then, her image was in the hands of others. W.M. Rossetti Hollyer of a daguerreotype, the only known described her as: photograph of her, reproduced as the frontispiece to The Wife of Rossetti by Violet Hunt (London: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1932) ‘a most beautiful creature with an air between dignity and sweetness with something that exceeded modest self-respect and partook of disdainful reserve; tall, finely-formed with a lofty neck and regular yet somewhat uncommon features, greenish-blue unsparkling eyes, large perfect eyelids, brilliant complexion and a lavish heavy wealth of coppery golden hair.’ cxxxii

24 Siddal sat first to Deverell for Viola in his Twelfth Night of 1849-50 (Private Collection). Shortly after, she appeared as the girl tending to the missionary in Hunt’s A Converted British Family… In both these paintings, exhibited in 1850, her hair is ‘coppery golden’. In the spring of 1851 she sat to Hunt for Sylvia in his Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus (first version), in a distinctive, rather awkward kneeling pose (Fig. 24). Her hair is still coppery, but noticeably less so, and a year later in the spring of 1852, when she sat to Millais for his Ophelia (‘wonderfully like her’, according to Arthur Hughes cxxxiii ), her hair was brown with only a hint of copper (Fig. 25). I am not suggesting that her hair actually did change its colour, which re-appears in Rossetti’s subsequent paintings of her - it was the artists who played stylist, in response to public opinion, cxxxiv for red hair was not considered beautiful by the Victorians (Judas Iscariot, according to tradition, had red hair). The Pre-Raphaelites also changed the shape of the faces of their models to suit the prevailing taste in girlish beauty at the time; for example, when Wilkie Collins wrote in his review of the Academy of 1851:

‘Why should not Mr Millais have sought, as a model for his ‘Woodman’s Daughter’, a child with some of the bloom, the freshness, the roundness of childhood, instead of the sharp featured little workhouse-drudge we see on his canvas? Would his colour have been less forcible, his drawing less fine, if he had conceded thus much to public taste?’ cxxxv

Millais repainted the face in his picture. cxxxvi The Pre-Raphaelites, like most impoverished artists, recruited anyone within range who didn’t charge a fee to sit for them - passers by, neighbours, relatives and even each other. Different people would sit for different parts of the body. Faces, and hair and eyes would change in response to criticism, or to conform to a type, or even because of insecurities of the painter (Hunt, for example, was acutely conscious of his little button nose, and so preferred roman noses in his models). The Pre-Raphaelites were not painting portraits, they were composing characters. Collins himself was apparently the ‘hindermost savage’ to the right of Siddal in Hunt’s A Converted British Family… cxxxvii and may also have sat for the man in Millais’s A Huguenot…. cxxxviii (although Arthur Lemprière sat for the head cxxxix ) but in neither picture do the faces look like Millais’ 1850 pencil portrait of Collins, and the hair is not red. cxl

Pretty models came at a price. At about the same time as Hunt was painting Siddal for Valentine… in the spring of 1851, Collins was painting the figure for St. Elizabeth… kneeling in a very similar awkward kneeling pose. Collins, sitting to the left of Hunt, could have drawn Siddal at the same sitting, from slightly further round. Hunt, short of money at the time, would have been grateful to share the expense of a paid model with his friends. cxli Collins, who was ashamed of his own vivid red hair, made his girl a brunette. cxlii Both artists changed the faces in their pictures at later stages: Sylvia is fuller and rounder of face in the second version of Valentine…(Fig. 26), reworked by Hunt in August 1851, probably in response to Ruskin’s criticism of her ‘commonness of feature’ as almost the only weakness in the picture. cxliii Evidence of pentimenti around the head of St Elizabeth indicate a change of mind by Collins, too. cxliv

Across all the early likenesses of Siddal mentioned here, which are a year or two either side of 1851 when Collins painted St. Elizabeth…, can be seen the development of her image towards the fuller face and browner hair of Millais’ Ophelia. The manipulation of Siddal’s image is an evolutionary process that began before Rossetti reinvented her as Beatrice to his Dante. Collins’s St. Elizabeth is likely to be from several models, including Elizabeth Siddal. When he asked her to sit for him again in November 1852, Collins discovered that Rossetti had claimed her as his exclusive property:

‘Collins wants a model for his next picture [probably his ‘Thou who has given me eyes to see, etc.’ for the Academy of 1853] and wrote to Miss Siddal, but was answered in a Figure 25. Sir John Everett Millais, Ophelia (detail – the model was Elizabeth Siddal), most freezing manner, stating that she had other occupations.’ cxlv 1851-2, oil on canvas, 30 x 44 in, Tate Britain, London, © Tate

For the time being, after his failure to get St. Elizabeth… ready for the Academy of 1851, Collins turned its face to the wall and spent the rest of the year with Millais and Hunt in Surrey.

Elizabeth Siddal sat, or rather knelt, for these figures 1849- 1852. Their chronology is problematic, and other models were also involved. They are not portraits; rather she was practically a template, and her features (the colour of her hair and eyes, the fullness of her face) evolved according to theme, whim, ideal, fashion and in response to critical opinion.

Clockwise from top left:

Detail of Figure 6, Hunt’s A Converted British Family. . . , 1849-50

Figure 24. William Holman Hunt, Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus (detail of Silvia from the first version), 1850-1, 1852, retouched 1861, © The Makins Collection/Bridgeman Images

Figure 26. William Holman Hunt, Valentine Rescuing Silvia from Proteus (detail of Sylvia from the second, larger version), 1850-1, © Birmingham Museums Trust

Detail of Figure 1, Collins’s The Devout Childhood of St Elizabeth of Hungary, 1851-2

Figure 28. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, St Elizabeth of Hungary Kneeling with Her Companions, c. 1852, pencil on paper, 10 x 8 3/4 ins, © Birmingham Museums Trust

26 ST ELIZABETH… AT THE ACADEMY, 1852

Millais wrote somewhat offhandedly to Hunt in January 1852:

‘Collins has given up entirely the two women at the mill [the ‘shed’] and I guess is about the St Matilda or Margaret of Hungary.’ cxlvi

Collins had retrieved St Elizabeth… and was busy getting it ready for the Academy; the changes to the background and the wall were probably executed at this time. In the meantime, he had not been idle and he had two other pictures for the Academy: one was modern subject on a mahogany panel, cxlvii May (Tate Britain), one of the first pure landscapes produced by the Pre-Raphaelites, of Regent’s Park (Fig. 29). There are obvious similarities to the landscape introduced in the background he added to St Elizabeth…. The third picture he showed that year bore no title, but it was described by a verse from Keble’s Lyra Innocentium cxlviii in the catalogue to the exhibition:

‘So keep thou, by calm prayer and searching thought, Thy Chrisom pure…. Thou mayst put on the garb of purity.’

This painting, another that is now lost, is remembered by a beautiful pencil version in the Huntington Library (Fig. 30).

Reviews of Collins’s pictures were mixed. As a champion and exemplar of the Pre-Raphaelites alongside Millais and Hunt he came in for general contempt as well as specific criticism of his Romish tendencies. The harsh line and flat perspective of his medievalist style were hard for the critics to accept, especially amongst the provincial journals. It was far from all bad, however, and Collins was also regularly singled out with praise for his fine painting:

The Spectator, 5 June 1852:

‘”The Devout Childhood of St. Elizabeth of Hungary," by Mr. Collins, is a good example of Pre-Raphaelite industry; the grain of the oaken church-door, the young rose-bushes, and the accessories generally, being reproduced with great care and success. There does not exist a more conscientious or consistent adherent of the school than Mr. Collins. But his aspiration scarcely keeps pace with his perseverance…. he should rise altogether above the little excellences of quietism, into masculine vigour and sympathies.’

Illustrated London News 22 May 1852 Figure 29. Charles Allston Collins, May in the Regent’s Park, 1851, oil on mahogany board, 17 1/2 in x 27 1/4 in, Tate ‘… disagreeable affair, on account of the sickly Britain, London, © Tate sentimentality with which it is imbued. … there she kneels, in a very fine blue taffeta dress, of quaint construction, with her commonplace face resting against the oak door, as she

27 tries to peer through a crevice; but whether at a supper party or a religious ceremony, there is nothing in the character or expression of her countenance to indicate. The grass-plat, gravel walk, and two rose trees are mere efforts of copyism, worthy only of a child.’

The Athenaeum, 1852 p 582 ‘The representations of texture are perfect; the strong wall is as true as is the oak graining of the door. The hinges are most mediaeval and Puginesque - the costume of blue and green shot silk is Byzantine. The hands and face of the maiden adhere nicely to the flat surface, - but the expression is rather pouting than devout, and the countenance is more pinky and school-girlish than saint-like.’

The Northern Star, 29 May 1852, after raving about Millais's offerings that year, The Huguenot ('undoubtedly the greatest object of attraction in the exhibition - it is the koh-i-noor of colours') and Ophelia (‘perfect harmony, the most luminous beauty, and a miraculous finish’), and finding Hunt's Hireling Shepherd 'repulsive' but 'marvellously accurate', alighted on ‘one other picture of the same school by Collins’, writing 'the expression of the maiden is not the most saint-like, but, the painting is perfect in all its details.' The critic of the Morning Chronicle, 17 May 1852, on the other hand, was no fan of the Pre-Raphaelites, and whilst praising Ophelia for 'startling originality and bravadoing boldness of design' he then damned it equally for being 'too perfectly expressionless', and of the Hireling Shepherd he thought the figures '... revolting. Such coarse Yahoos never before appeared on canvas.' He reserved his strongest vitriol for Collins, 'The most rash adventurer into the very depths of the revived heresy', whose St. Elizabeth he described 'a flat young lady, pinning on a monastic dress... looking in reality very much as if she had been somehow split into two halves, whereof one was attached to the sacred portals.'

The consensus of tempered critical judgement was given in David Masson’s perceptive article about the Pre- Raphaelites in the Quarterly Review of 1852. He summed up:

'Of the original seven, ...one or two have either given up Art or fallen off from the brotherhood, while one or two others have been added in their places. The Pre-Raphaelites now best known are Hunt, Millais, the elder Rossetti, and C. Collins…’

and went on to speak of St Elizabeth…;

’…we have a pious little girl of thirteen or fourteen years of age, with a rather comely, healthy face, brown hair, and a green dress, kneeling at the iron-barred oaken door of a chapel, her hands against the wood, and a missal, which she has brought up the gravel-walk with her, deposited on the door-step. Here, too the technical performance is good; but, if we take the sentiment into account, we begin, in spite of liking, to grow angry. In short, it is in… Mr. Collins’s choice of subjects generally, that we discern something of that paltry affection for middle age ecclesiasticism with which the Pre-Raphaelites as a body have been too hastily charged. …most decidedly the public is right in declaring, that though the painting were never so good, it will not stand that sort of thing. The most important thing about a work of art, and that which most surely gives the style and measure of the artist’s intellect, is the choice of the subject. …an artist unmans himself if the habitual and pre-ordered forthgoing of his contemplations is along the line of these petty ecclesiasticalities, where his eyes never lose sight of the Tractarian parson, and where his hands may touch the tops of the pews. …Or, to concentrate what we have to say into a humbler, and …more available form, let Mr. Collins pitch Keble overboard, and addict himself to Tennyson.’

Figure 30. Charles Allston Collins, Lyra Innocentium, 1852, pencil on Collins would eventually ‘pitch Keble overboard’, but too late. By 1852, it was apparent that Rossetti, Hunt and paper, 9 1/4 X 6 1/4, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, © Millais at least were developing beyond the original tenets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Rather than in God, Huntington Library Rossetti’s ‘deepest belief was that woman enshrines the mystery of existence, both in an actual and a metaphysical sense.’ cxlix Hunt’s work was becoming elevated beyond sectarian debate, in the service of Christ.

28 When Millais exhibited The Huguenot at the Royal Academy alongside St. Elizabeth…, of a Protestant refusing to wear a Catholic armband to avoid persecution, it was clear statement that he at least was no ‘Romanist’. Collins was not as obsessed with women as Rossetti, as divinely inspired as Hunt, nor as attuned to commercial expedience as Millais. Exhibiting at the Academy of 1852 not one, but two High Church subjects in the face of Ruskin’s comments and after all the criticism of the previous year was a sort of commercial suicide.

If some Victorian Anglicans then saw St. Elizabeth… as ‘monkish folly’, modern historians looking at his total output have a wider perspective. Alastair Grieve:

‘The central theme of all Collins’ art seems to be the idea of pure womanhood and women’s relation to men. Some of his women are concerned women – Berengaria, the Electric Telegraph wife, the Shelley flower girl - while others are devoted to the pure life – Convent Thoughts, the Keble lady. St. E. has it both ways – but [here] her attention is fastened on the pure life.’ cl

The picture did not sell at the Academy of 1852, but was bought for £100 the following year by a collector whom Rossetti called ‘the Irish maniac’, Francis McCracken, a colourful Belfast cotton mill owner who amassed a collection of early Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Cotton mills were not doing well in the 1850s, and McCracken took a long time to pay for the picture, and was eventually forced to sell his whole collection. It was offered in two sales, the first at Christie’s 17th June 1854 (including Rossetti’s Annunciation, Hunt’s Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus cli, and Hughes’s Ophelia), and, after some failed to sell, again on the 31st March 1855, but this time with St Elizabeth…. Collins wrote indignantly to Hunt in February 1855:

‘I have been vexed by tidings from McCracken (who only this morning completed the payment of his debt to me) that my picture is to find its way in company with your “Two Gentlemen” and Rossetti’s Annunciation. This is terrible news to me.’ clii

Collins then paused to write to Rossetti about it, and in the same letter relayed Rossetti’s reaction to Hunt:

‘…he thinks McCrac. a fool for his pains, unless he thinks £20 (possible) in 1855 a good return for £100 paid in 1853.’ cliii

St Elizabeth… failed to find a buyer, and was released by Christie’s to a ‘Mr Watkins’ at which point the picture disappeared until it resurfaced on the market in London in about 1950.

Christmas 2014

29 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anon. ‘James Smetham and C. Allston Collins’, The Art Journal 1904, pp 281-4 A) Barringer, Tim, Jason Rosenfeld and Alison Smith. Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde, exh. cat. London: Tate Gallery, 2012. B) Barringer, Tim. Pre-Raphaelites: Reading the Image. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1998. Bowness, Alan.The Pre-Raphaelites, exh. cat. London: Tate Gallery, 1984. Bronkhurst, Judith. William Holman Hunt: a Catalogue Raisonné. London: Yale University Press, 2006. Butler, Alban. The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs and Other Principal Saints, first published 1756-9. The edition most likely to have been used by Collins was published in 1847 Christie’s, London. Pictures, by Modern English Masters. Sale Catalogue 31 March 1855, Lot 95. Collins, Charles Allston. Letters (24), mainly to William Holman Hunt, 1850-71. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Cruise, Colin. Pre-Raphaelite Drawing, exh. cat. Birmingham: Birmingham Museum and Art Galleries, 2011. Ellis, S. M. Wilkie Collins, Le Fanu and Others. London: Constable & Co., 1931. Errington, Lindsay. ‘Social and Religious Themes in English Art, 1840-1860’, 1973, Outstanding Theses from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London: Garland Publishing, 1984. Fleming, Gordon H. John Everett Millais, A Biography. London: Constable, 1998. Gere, J. A. Pre-Raphaelite Drawings in the British Museum. London: British Museum Press, 1994. A) Grieve, Alastair. ‘The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Anglican High Church’. The Burlington Magazine, 111: 794 (1969): pp 292, 294-295. B) Grieve, Alastair. The Art of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Decade 1848-1858. Norwich: Real World, 2010. C) Grieve, Alastair. ‘A Notice on Illustrations to Charles Kingsley’s “The Saint’s Tragedy” by Three Pre-Raphaelite Artists’, The Burlington Magazine, 111: 794 (1969): pp 290-3 Hawksley, Lucinda. Charles Dickens’ Favorite Daughter: the Life, Loves, and Art of Katey Dickens Perugini. Guilford, Connecticut: Lyons Press, 2013. Humphreys, Henry Noel. The Miracles of Our Lord. London: Longmans & Co., 1848. Hunt, William Holman. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. London: MacMillan and Co., Ltd., 1905. Hunt, Diana Holman. My Grandfather, His Wives and Loves. London: Hamish Hamilton 1969. Hutton, Laurence, ed. Letters of Charles Dickens to Wilkie Collins. New York: Harper Brothers Publishers, 1892. A) Lutyens, Mary. ‘Letters from Sir John Everett Millais, Bart, P.R.A. (1829-1896), and William Holman Hunt O.M. (1827-1910) in the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California’, The Volume of the Walpole Society, 44 (1972-1974): pp 1-93. B) Lutyens, Mary. ‘Selling the Missionary’, Apollo, 86 (1967): pp 380-387. C) Lutyens, Mary. Millais and the Ruskins, London: John Murray, 1967. Lycett, Andrew. Wilkie Collins: a Life of Sensation. London: Windmill Books, 2013. Maas, Jeremy. Holman Hunt & The Light of the World. London: Scholar Press, 1984. McLean, Ruari. Victorian Book Design and Colour Printing. London: Faber & Faber, 1972. Millais, John Guille. The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais. London: Methuen & Co., 1899. Montalembert, Comte de. The Chronicle of the Life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, Duchess of Thuringia: Who Was Born in the Year of Grace MCCVII and Died in MCCXXXI. Translated by Ambrose Lisle Phillipps. London: Booker and Dolman, 1839. Neale, Anne. ‘Considering the Lilies: Symbolism and Revelation in Convent Thoughts (1852) by Charles Allston Collins (1828-73)’, The British Art Journal, 11: 1 (2010): pp 93-98. O’Donnell, Elliott. Mrs E. M. Ward’s Reminiscences. London: Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1911. Treuherz, Julian. Parris, Leslie, ed. ‘The Pre-Raphaelites and Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts’, Pre-Raphaelite Papers. London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1984, pp153-169. Rosenfeld, Jason, and Alison Smith. Millais. London: Tate Publishing, 2007. A) Rossetti, William Michael. Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti. London: Brown Langham & Co Ltd., 1906. B) Rossetti, William Michael. D.G. Rossetti: His Family Letters, with a Memoir. London: Ellis and Elvey, 1895. C) Rossetti, William Michael. Fredeman, William E., ed., The P.R.B. Journal. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Ruskin, John. The Stones of Venice, vol. 1. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1851. Staley, Professor Allen, and Christopher Newall. Pre-Raphaelite Vision: Truth to Nature. London: Tate Publishing, 2004. Story, Alfred T. The Life of John Linnell. London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1892. Webb, Barbara C.L. Millais and the Hogsmill River. London: Barbara C. L. Webb, 1997. Weinberg, Gail S. '”An Irish Maniac’: Ruskin, Rossetti, and Francis McCracken’, The Burlington Magazine, 143: 1181 (August 2001): pp 491-493.

30 NOTES

i Story, Vol 1, p 278-9 ii Gilchrist, Alexander. The Life of William Blake, London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1907, p 331 iii Hunt, Vol 1, p 271 iv Wilkie Collins: Collection of 117 autograph letters to his mother, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, Department of Literary and Historical Manuscripts. Letter 19: Wilkie Collins to Harriet Collins, 30 Sept. 1845 v Story, Vol 1, p 276 vi Ward, E.M., O’Donnell Elliott (Ed.) Mrs E.M. Ward’s Reminiscences, London: Sir Isaac Pitman, 1911, p 77 vii Note from Harriet Collins appended to Huntington Library MSL HH 68, Collins to Hunt 7 – 14 February 1855 viii Hunt Vol 1, p 201 ix Both small oils, on panels, Millais’s of 1850 is in the National Portrait Gallery, London, and Collins’s of 1853 is in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge x Household Words, 15 June 1850 xi Berengaria’s Alarm… was ‘another instance of perversion’ to the reviewer of the Athenaeum. The reviewer of the Times thought it looked like an ‘illuminated chessboard’ xii The Times, Oct. 14, 1850 xiii The Times, Oct. 29, 1850 xiv The Bulwark or Reformation Journal, London: Seelys and J. Nisbet and Co., 1852, Vol. 1 1851-2, p 56 xv B) Rossetti, Vol 1, p 134 xvi B) Rossetti, Vol 2, p 97, quoted in A) Grieve p 294 xvii Quoted in B) Lutyens, p 381 xviii Millais’s father, of an old Jersey family, had independent means, and his mother was from a family of successful saddlers. Collins had a small independent income (Dickens letter), (his father had left an £11,000 legacy that brought his mother more than £700 a year). xix Millais, Vol 1, p 103: Millais to Mrs. Combe 28th May 1851 xx Hunt, Diana Holman, p 76. Elizabeth Siddal was to have joined them but cancelled at the last minute when she heard that Annie Miller was going. xxi B) Grieve, p 77 xxii Millais wrote to Mrs. Combe on the 15th of January 1851: ’I saw Carlo last night, who has been very lucky in persuading a very beautiful young lady to sit for the head of “The Nun”” (Millais, Vol 1, p 94). This was Frances Ludlow. She is listed as ‘Housemaid’ at the Combes’s house in the 1851 census, and must have got the job through Collins and Millais. xxiii Quoted in Bowness, no. 33 xxiv The Bennet family is interesting: William Bennet was involved in acquiring Hunt’s Converted British Family… for the Combes (see Lutyens, Mary, Selling the Missionary, Apollo 86, November 1967, pp 380–387). Another William Bennett (the Rev. W.J.E. Bennett, 1804-1886), too young to have been the sitter in Collins’s portrait, was the first incumbent at St. Barnabas Church, Pimlico, founded on St Barnabas’ Day in 1850 (James Collinson used it as the setting for An Incident in the Life of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary of 1850; see Stephen Wildman, Visions of Love and Life: Pre-Raphaelite Art from the Birmingham Collection, Art Services International, 1995, cat.14, pp. 98-99). It was a very ‘High’ church, with elaborate ritual in the services; at the height of the ‘No Popery’ riots Bennett had to resign, leaving for the Living at Frome-Selwood in Somerset, where he was joined in 1853-4 by Christina Rossetti and her mother to help run a school attached to the church. In 1869, Thomas and Martha Combe funded another St. Barnabas Church in Jericho, Oxford and the same Rev. William Bennett read a sermon there on 24th October 1872, a week before Combe died. The sermon was printed in a leaflet issued for Combe’s funeral (I am grateful to Alastair Grieve for alerting me to this). The two Bennet(t)s are however unlikely to be related, for the younger was born in Nova Scotia. xxv Millais, Vol 1, p 94 xxvi ‘The Oxford martyrdoms’ – probably a reference to the anti-Tractarian Martyrs’ Memorial built in 1843 by Sir George Gilbert Scott, opposite Balliol College in Oxford. It commemorates the death of the Protestant churchmen Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer, prominent figures in the Reformation burnt during the reign of Mary I. I am grateful to Alastair Grieve for pointing this out. xxvii Millais, Vol 1, p 88

31 xxviii W.M. Rossetti wrote: 'It is a sad and indeed a humiliating reflection that, after the early days of camaraderie and of genuine brotherliness had run their course… keen antipathies severed the quondam P.R.B.s... Woolner became hostile to Hunt, Dante Rossetti. and Millais. Hunt became hostile to Woolner and Stephens, and in a minor degree to Dante Rossetti. Stephens became hostile to Hunt. Dante Rossetti became hostile to Woolner, and in a minor degree to Hunt and Millais. Millais, being an enormously successful man while others were only commonly successful, did not perhaps become strictly hostile to anyone: he kept aloof however from Dante Rossetti, and I infer from Woolner.' A) Rossetti, p 75 xxix C) Rossetti, p 71 xxx C) Rossetti, p 78 xxxi Hunt, Vol 1, p 268 xxxii Hunt, Vol 1, p 266 xxxiii C) Rossetti, 2 May 1851 xxxiv Hunt, Vol 1, p 293-4 xxxv ‘The nearest approach to a “preference” that I knew her at any time to entertain was bestowed upon Collins.’ A) Rossetti, p 152 xxxvi Hunt wrote that Collins was rejected in the winter of 1850-1 after returning from Oxford (Hunt, Vol 1, p 294) but W.M. Rossetti in Some Reminiscences A) Rossetti, p 152 says they were not intimate until 1855 - however Maria favoured Ruskin at this time, if anyone. One of the few surviving pictures by Collins is a water-colour that was in the collection of the dealer Neil Wilson called 'Idolo del mio cuor / Nume adorato’ (Idol of my heart, adored of God). The lines, engraved on a tombstone in a wilderness and initialled ‘C.A.C.’, grieved over by a kneeling woman in a similar pose to St. Elizabeth…, are the first lines of a Venetian song from Il Bugiardo (The Liar) a comedy by Carlo Goldoni, the eighteenth century Venetian playwright, sung whilst Florindo speaks of his love for Rosaura, to whom he is too shy to declare himself, allowing his rival Lelio to concoct fabulous lies and convince Rosaura that he wishes to marry her instead. It is possible that Collins’s picture was aimed at Maria Rossetti. Maria finally became an Anglican nun in the year of Collins’s death, 1873, knowing by then that she, like Collins, had cancer. xxxvii C) Rossetti, p 85 xxxviii Hunt, Vol 1, p 248-9 xxxix The Times, 3 May 1851 xl According to a deleted note in the MS of the P.R.B. Journal, it was Ruskin’s father who wanted to buy it (but probably at the instigation of his son). C) Rossetti, p 183, n 8.4 xli The Times, 13 May 1851 xlii The Times, 13 May 1851 xliii John Rylands Library, Hunt to Lear correspondence, 1851-4, MS 1214/11 xliv B) Barringer, p. 68 xlv Webb, p. 12 xlvi National Art Library MSL/1983/16/1-4: On 12 September 1905, Hunt wrote to his friend Henry Hardinge Cunynghame (1848-1935) about his memoirs: ‘My dramatis personae are really portraits, although I have tried to treat them as all representations should be portrayed in art, with selective fastidiousness…. Edith wants every word of unamiable strain to be cut out but that would make the book very tame and untrue.’ xlvii Millais, Vol 1, p 116 xlviii Millais, Vol 1, p 123: Millais to Mrs Combe, from Worcester Park Farm, September, 1851. xlix Millais, Vol 1, p 137. Hunt remembered the same episode: ‘Blackberry pudding was hugely in favour with Millais, and on one occasion he ridiculed Charley Collins for refusing the dainty dish, taking the despised portion in addition to his own, so that the pudding when it returned to the kitchen bore no trace of want of appreciation. On our return to the sitting-room he bantered our abstemious friend on his self-denial, saying, “You know you like blackberry pudding as much as I do, and it is this preposterous rule of supererogation which you have adopted in your high-churchism which made you go without it. I have no doubt you will think it necessary to have a scourge and take the discipline for having had any dinner at all." He was so persistent in his attacks on poor Charley, and his appeals to me to second him, that when these became troublesome I turned away from the fire and took up a recently commenced design at a side table. Millais continued his sarcasm until Collins somewhat prematurely took his candle and wished us good-night. When he had gone Millais turned to me and said, “Why didn’t you pitch into him? We must cure him of this monkish nonsense. You scarcely helped me at all. It is doing him a deal of harm, taking away the little strength of will he has.”' Hunt, Vol 1, p 288-9 l Hunt, Vol 1, p 298

32 li Hunt, Vol 1, p 304 lii Hunt, Vol 1, p 271 liii Millais, Vol 1 p 133: ‘At this time Charles Collins was engaged on the background for a picture, the subject of which he had not yet settled upon. He got as far as placing upon the canvas an old shed with broken roof and sides, through which the sunlight streamed; with a peep outside at leaves glittering in the summer breeze; and at this he worked week after week with ever varying ideas as to the subject he should ultimately select. At last he found a beautiful one in the legend of a French peasant, who, with his family, outcast and starving, had taken refuge in the ruined hut and were ministered to by a saint. The picture, however, was never finished. Poor Collins gave up painting in despair and drifted into literature; and when the end came, Holman Hunt, who was called in to make a sketch of his friend, was much touched to find this very canvas (then taken off the strainers) lying on the bed beside the dead man. The tragedy of vanished hopes!’ liv Hunt, Vol 1, p 292. Good subjects were jealously guarded. One wonders whose idea it was, Millais’s or Collins’s, to paint companion pictures earlier in the year, for Collins could not have stood up to Millais as Hunt did. lv Millais, Vol. 1, p 151: Millais to Mr. Combe, 12 December 1851 lvi Hunt, Vol 1, p 305 lvii Copy of MSL Millais to Hunt 25 Oct 1852, Maas Archive (whereabouts of the original unknown) lviii C) Rossetti, p 97 lix From Keble’s poem for Septuagesima Sunday in The Christian Year, 1827. The poem is subtitled with a line from Romans 1, 20: ‘The invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.’ The last stanza reads: ‘Thou, who hast given me eyes to see, And love this sight so fair, Give me a heart to find out Thee, And read Thee everywhere.’ It is the Romantic poetical idea of God in Nature. John Keble (1792-1866) preached a powerful sermon in 1833, National Apostasy, that sparked the Oxford Movement; it challenged the nation to see the church not as an institution, but as the prophetic voice of God. Keble became a highly popular poet, two of his most popular books of poetry being The Christian Year and Lyra Innocentium. The Christian Year was wildly popular, and ran to over a hundred editions by the time of Keble’s death in 1866. Keble College (to which Thomas Combe gave Hunt’s The Light of the World) was founded in his memory. Today, his poetry survives as hymns. lx Huntington Library, MSL HM 12933 lxi Diana Holman Hunt quotes (p 151) from a letter from Millais to Hunt 7-13 February 1854: ‘Collins is working gradually from his old picture which is really very good indeed, the colour especially.’ The subject was a nativity scene from the life of another Roman Catholic saint, Madame de Chantal, who unusually but like St. Elizabeth, was both an aristocrat and a mother. In 1610, she founded The Congregation of the Visitation, an order that accepted older nuns, and the sick. The order was not cloistered at first and did good works out amongst the public. Huntington MSL HH63: Collins wrote to Hunt April 6-7 1854 ‘I have seen no picture but yours and Leslie's Rape of the Lock and the Wards, and one, which I am sincerely glad that at the moment I do not see, one which has long occupied certain feet of what would otherwise have been air, in this room, and of which I have seen quite enough lately to last me sometime, and which I will not allude to more specifically than to mention that its background was a representation of a shed in Surrey and to relieve your good-natured anxiety for my welfare by telling you that, somehow it got finished in time for the R.A..’ lxii W.M. Rossetti wrote in the Spectator that it was ‘by many degrees the most important and the best work which the painter has exhibited’ (20 May 1854, p 543) lxiii Morning Chronicle, April 29, 1854 lxiv C) Lutyens, pp 214 and 225 lxv C) Lutyens, p 220n lxvi C) Lutyens, p 245 lxvii C) Lutyens, p 250-1 lxviii Huntington Library MSL HH68 Collins to Hunt 7-14th February 1855: ‘Last night I parted with Millais at the door of a cab in which he was starting to the Terminus at Kings Cross there to embark in the night train to Edinburgh preparing the next morning to go on to Perth. You can guess on what errand. There is some one there who has passed through it seems to me to be just about as terrible an ordeal as any human being can, and it is to see her (for the first time since the dreadful time in Scotland) that Millais has undertaken this journey at this time. I do not know that it is likely the marriage will take place yet. At least there was no time settled when he left town. You know of course that I am speaking of her who used to be called Mrs. Ruskin, and you also know that she bears the name no longer but is perfectly free. Her nature from what I gather seems wonderfully suited to Millais’ and she seems to be governed by a most wonderful sense of religious responsibility which is the only safeguard.’ Mrs. Collins appended a note to this long letter: ‘My Dear son no. 4 – …I have been so engaged by Millais’ affairs that I think of little else am now longing to hear all the tidings he will bring on his return to Charles

33 and me. He was staying here nearly two months and he kept us alive with a vengeance never was such spirits His rooms are lonely his studio like a Lady’s drawing room for he xxxx such a xxxx care xxxx carpet chair tables all polished shining a perfect pattern to the dirty untidy studios as Wards, Charles and who else I wonder!’ lxix Hunt, Vol 2, p 14, quoting a letter from Millais to Hunt. lxx Academy Notes, 1855 lxxi Quoted in Hunt, Diana Holman, p 151. It is unlikely that he was then suffering from the symptoms of the stomach cancer that eventually killed him eighteen years later, but there is a considerably increased risk of contracting it from a poor diet. lxxii Brown, Ford Madox, Diary, 17 March 1855 lxxiii Millais, Vol 1, p 288 lxxiv Millais, Vol 1, p 89 lxxv Huntington Library MSL HH68: Collins pointed Hunt to the bible, ‘Exodus 31.1-7 a most wonderful passage.’ The passage includes: ‘…I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship, To devise cunning works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass’ lxxvi Huntington Library MSL HH68 Collins to Hunt 7-14th February 1855 lxxvii Huntington Library MSL HH68 Collins to Hunt 7-14th February 1855 lxxviii BM 1891-4-4-22 to 25. In Huntington Library, MSL HH 1 Collins describes how he used these sketches to consult Millais. lxxix Bowness, p 20 lxxx Huntington Library, MSL HH 1 lxxxi Huntington Library, MSL HH 1, Collins to Hunt 22 April 1856 lxxxii Huntington Library, MSL HH 1, Collins to Hunt 22 April 1856 lxxxiii Handbook to the Permanent Collection of the Manchester City Art Gallery, 1910, entry for The Pedlar (Berengaria’s Alarm…) lxxxiv Quoted in Hunt, Diana Holman, p 153 lxxxv Hawksley, pp 218-9 lxxxvi Fleming, p 190 lxxxvii Tate Archive, 2007/10: Millais to Leech, July 4 1854 lxxxviii Hunt, Vol 1, p 299 lxxxix An Apology for the Symbolism introduced into the picture called “THE LIGHT of the WORLD”. There seems only one extant copy of this pamphlet: University of Kansas, MS60, Vol. 1, item 35. I am grateful to Judith Bronkhurst for drawing my attention to it. xc Huntington Library, MSL HH 71, Collins to Hunt 22 June 1865 (wrongly dated 1856) xci Hunt, Vol 2, p 313 xcii Millais Vol 1, p 99 xciii Quoted in B) Lutyens p 386 xciv Hunt, pp 232-6 xcv See Lutyens B) p 386. I asked Emma Hicks, who researched my father’s books, to have a close look at Bennet: Widower of Syde, Gloucestershire, he wrote his will in March 1850 when he was 76 years old. He had no children and he divided his estate between his three surviving sisters, and left legacies of £100 and £200 to the two nieces who had been living with him for some years. One of his sisters, Martha Howell Edwards, referred to in the will as ‘a widow of Ramsgate’, was Martha Combe’s mother. However, in the June quarter of 1850, a death is recorded on the Isle of Thanet (the Ramsgate area) for Martha Howell Edwards. Bennet, as a grateful long-term guest of the Combes, may have felt that Martha Combe should have something from him, especially since after her mother’s death she would not then inherit his legacy through his sister, and he may have thought buying Hunt’s picture a way of giving her £150 xcvi Quoted in B) Lutyens p 386 xcvii Quoted in B) Lutyens p 385 xcviii Millais, Vol 1, pp 97-98: Millais to Mr. Combe, January 28th, 1851: ‘The subject is quite new and, I think, fortunate; it is the dove returning to the Ark with the olive- branch.’ xcix Millais, Vol 1, p 101

34 c Hunt, Vol 1, p 276: ‘Select a prepared ground originally for its brightness, and renovate if necessary with fresh white when first it comes into the studio; white to be mixed with a very little amber or copal varnish. Let this last coat become of thoroughly stone-like hardness. Upon this surface complete with exactness the outline of the part in hand. On the morning for the painting, with fresh white from which all superfluous oil has been extracted by means of absorbent paper, and to which again a small drop of varnish has been added, spread a further coat very evenly with a palette-knife over the part for the day's work, of such consistency that the drawing should faintly shine through. In some cases the thickened white may be applied to the forms needing brilliancy with a brush, by the aid of rectified spirits. Over this wet ground, the colour (transparent and semi- transparent) should be laid with light sable brushes, and the touches must be made so tenderly that the ground below shall not be worked up, yet so far enticed to blend with the superimposed tints as to correct the qualities of thinness and staininess which over a dry ground transparent colours used would inevitably exhibit. Painting of this kind cannot be retouched except with an entire loss of luminosity.’ ci Ford Madox Brown in particular admired the effect and went to some lengths to learn the process from Millais and Hunt, but had trouble with it painting Christ’s robe. Brown wrote to Lowes Dickinson ‘As to the pure white ground, you had better adopt that at once, because I can assure you, you will be forced to ultimately, for Hunt and Millais, whose works kill everything on the exhibition for brilliancy, will in a few years force everyone who will not drop behind them to use their methods.’ Quoted in Hunt, Diana Holman, p 77. cii Thomas Brown (known as ‘Young Brown’), of 163 High Holborn, London was a well-known Artists’ Colourman who had supplied Millais with canvases since the late 1840s. His father, ‘Old Brown’, had supplied many of the Royal Academicians of William Collins’s generation. In 1842 Young Brown claimed that he, his father, and his father's predecessor, had between them supplied all the Royal Academy’s Presidents up to that time, and that they had been the favoured servants of the Royal Academy since its foundation (The Art-Union January 1842 p.18, quoted on the National Portrait Gallery (London) website, British artists' suppliers, 1650-1950: http://www.npg.org.uk/research/programmes/artists-their-materials-and-suppliers.php). ciii I am grateful to Jevon Thistlewood, Paintings Conservator at the Ashmolean Museum, for confirming this civ Millais, Vol 1, p 100: Millais to Mr. Combe, 1 April, 1851: ‘I shall design (when it returns from the Academy) a frame suitable to the subject - olive leaves, and a dove at each corner holding the branch in its mouth.’ cv The frames were probably made by Criswick and Lepard of Soho, who made the frame for Millais’s The Huguenot the following year. (Copy of MSL Millais to Hunt February 20, 1852, Maas Archive (whereabouts of the original unknown) about some creeper Millais wanted Hunt to send him ‘…for Criswick the framemaker to cast for a frame he is going [to] make for the lovers…’) cvi Millais, Vol 1, p 97-8: Millais to Mr. Combe January 28th, 1851: ‘I shall have three figures - Noah praying, with the olive-branch in his hand, and the dove in the breast of a young girl who is looking at Noah. The other figure will be kissing the bird’s breast. The background will be very novel, as I shall paint several birds and animals one of which now forms the prey to the other. It is quite impossible to explain one’s intentions in a letter; so do not raise objections in your mind till you see it finished. I have a horrible influenza, which, however, has not deterred me from the usual ‘heavy blow’ walks with Fra Carlo.’ cvii Millais Vol 1, p 103: Millais to Mr. Combe 10 May 1851: ‘My somewhat showmanlike recommendation of Collins' 'Nun' is a pure matter of conscience, and I hope it will prove not altogether faulty.’ This letter was written after the Academy Exhibition had started. cviii Millais, Vol 1, p 150: Millais to Mr. Combe 9 December 1851: ‘You recollect it was arranged between Charley and my-self that it should hang nearest the window, beside Hunt's. Please let it be a little leaned forward. …The reason for hanging the picture nearer the light is that it is much darker than Collins' 'Nun.'’ cix Bowness, cat. no. 34 cx The four beneath representing the cardinal virtues of the ancient Greeks cxi Maas, p 16. Hunt insisted ‘All that the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had of Ruskin came from this reading of mine [Modern Painters]. Rossetti was too absorbed with Dante… and Millais never read anything, altho’ he had a real genius in getting others to tell him the results of their reading and their thoughts thereon’ (Hunt to Ruskin, 6 November 1880, sent 4 July 1882). The second volume of Ruskin’s Modern Painters, published in 1846, contained a detailed explanation of the typological symbolism of Tintoretto’s Annunciation of the Virgin. cxii Hunt’s own account of finding a door does not contradict this. Collins, after a visit to his mother in London, was due back by train to rejoin Hunt and Millais at Worcester Park Farm on the evening of Sunday October 19th 1851. The last train arrived at 8.55 pm, according to Bradshaw’s, August 1851, and it was a dark night with a new moon. Collins was afraid of the dark and had asked his friends to met him off the train. Hunt remembered noticing the time and asking Millais to join him, but Millais said he was tired, and Hunt set off alone in the dark of a new moon from to meet Collins at Kingston Station (now Surbiton Station) just under four miles away with a large lantern. Walking north

35 through Worcester Park along the course of the Hogsmill River, fascinated by the effects of lamplight, Hunt found an abandoned hut once used by workers at the Worcester Park gunpowder mills: 'On the riverside was a door locked up and overgrown with tendrils of ivy, its step choked with weeds' (Hunt, Vol 1, p 296). It was this image that inspired Hunt, and the closed door became ‘the obstinately shut mind’ (Hunt, Vol 1, p 350), but Hunt does not say that he actually painted the powdermill door (incidentally, it occurs to me that the adventure of finding the powdermill door door would have been more likely to have happened to the two friends together, ambling back from the Station, than to Hunt alone, running late, hurrying to meet Collins). Hunt recalled in The Contemporary Review of 1886 (Vol. XLIX) that he ‘made up an imitation door with adjuncts’ in his studio back in London, but Grieve, B): this postdates Hunt’s preparatory drawing (illustrated) where it is clear that it is the same door as Collins’s. I am grateful to Judith Bronkhurst for pointing out that the doors in both paintings are mirror images of one another, and for drawing my attention to Hunt’s article in The Contemporary Review. cxiii Butler cxiv He gave the manuscript of his unfinished prose life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary to Fanny as a wedding present in 1844, now in the British Library, MS 41296 cxv Grieve C). Millais’s drawing, which belonged to W.M. Rossetti and to Helen Rossetti d’Angeli, is illustrated here. It is very similar to Millais’s drawing Isabella, in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, which is dated. Two drawings by Rossetti, St. Elizabeth of Hungary kneeling at a prie-dieu with her Companions Isentrudis and Guta and Study for St. Elizabeth of Hungary (both Birmingham Museums Trust) are dated by Grieve to 1852, so were probably made after Collins’s painting. cxvi When the picture was exhibited at the National Institution in 1851, it was accompanied by a quote from Montalembert. Grieve B) p. 75, 19n. cxvii The church interior was taken 'from a brand new correct-period ritualistic church in London’, St. Barnabas, Pimlico, which had been 'founded in 1847 by the Rev. W. Bennett to help the work of the Anglican Church in what was then a very poor part of London. St Barnabas’ was consecrated on 11 June 1850 but Bennett’s elaborate ritualism and his attempts to establish a religious community at the church soon stirred up hostility and in the winter of this year the violent “No Popery” riots led to his resignation,’ B) Grieve. Collinson’s St. Elizabeth… was bought by the Dowager Marchioness of Bath, a leading supporter of the Tractarian movement. In 1852 she presented the living at Frome Selwood, which was in her gift, to Bennett, and Rossetti’s mother and sister Christina went down to Somerset to run a school under his direction. It was unsuccessful and the Rossettis returned in March 1854. cxviii The Nazarenes were a group of early Nineteenth century German artists who established a monastic community in Rome. Rejecting the prevailing taste of Academic Neo-Classicism, they wanted to revive what they saw as the early Christian values of honesty and spirituality in painting. They were greatly admired by the Pre-Raphaelites, and prints of their work were readily to hand. There was hardly a number of the Art Journal, as Quentin Bell noted in his lectures on Victorian art in the mid-1960s, which did not carry some account of the life and works of the Nazarenes. cxix Grieve B), p 39 cxx Quoted in Errington, pp 341-2 cxxi However, as Professor Stephen Wildman has pointed out (personal correspondence, 6 November 2014), the distinctive leafy spur on the column base may have been suggested by Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, Vol 1, published in 1851. Ruskin described one spur (Plate XII, p 290) as: ‘almost like the extremity of a man’s foot, … a Byzantine form (perhaps worn on the edges), from the nave of St. Mark’s.’ cxxii If so, then the date of 1852 on the drawing of St. Elizabeth… in Tate Britain was probably added by Collins later. This would account for its linear style, more characteristic of the previous year. After Ewell, Millais wrote to Hunt Jan 26 1852 ‘Collins has given up the two women at the mill and I guess is about the St. Matilda or Margaret of Hungary’. cxxiii Henry Noel Humphreys, 1810-1879, had been influenced by his study of medieval manuscripts during a stay in Italy as a young man. Collins is likely to have known Humphreys, because Noel’s son (also Noel) had sat for the young Jesus in Millais’s Christ in the House of his Parents of 1850. Humphreys first used the papier mâché process, patented by J Jackson and Son, on his Parables of Our Lord (Longman 1847). In The Miracles of our Lord Humphreys wrote that the cover of the book was ‘partly taken from a magnificent cover in carved ivory, executed in the 12th century, and enclosing a remarkable MS, of the Gospels, now in the British Museum. The designs of the medallions are original.’ I am grateful to Justin Croft for identifying the book. cxxiv McLean, p 210 cxxv Treuherz, pp 153-169 cxxvi Letter to the Times, May 5, 1854 cxxvii Lines from Keble’s Lyra Innocentium at the R.A. in 1853, and from a poem in his The Christian Year in 1854 cxxviii Errington, pp 253-4 cxxix Rosenfeld and Smith, p 54, referring to a letter from Millais to Mrs. Combe 22 November 1851 in Millais, Vol 1, p 135

36 cxxx Keble, John. Tracts for the Times no. 89, On the Mysticism attributed to the Early Fathers of the Church, London. Printed for J.G.F. & J. Rivington, Third Edition, 1841, pp 27-8 cxxxi Errington, p 424 cxxxii B) Rossetti, Vol 1, p 171. The figure of Collins’s St. Elizabeth… is not tall, unlike Siddal. ‘In January 1850 Christina Rossetti wrote to William Michael from Longleat, the seat of the Marchioness of Bath, where her aunt Charlotte Polidori was governess, “Lady Bath was discussing Saint’s Tragedy [by Charles Kingsley] with me the other night, and she has lent me a very interesting life of St Elizabeth by Montalembert”. Referring to chapter two where Montalembert wrote that as a child Elizabeth used to revel in her lack of height compared to her peers in order that she might “humble herself before God”, Christina wrote to William Michael, “Does not the Poem give you the idea that the Saint was a little woman?”.’ Joanna Meacock, Saintly ecstasies: the appropriation and secularisation of saintly imagery in the paintings and poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2001, p 105 cxxxiii From The Letters of DG Rossetti to William Allingham, quoted in Millais, Vol 1, p 144 cxxxiv Millais had ‘styled’ Mary Hodgkinson with coppery hair for Isabella in his Isabella of 1849, and ‘styled’ her again as a flaming red-head for the figure of Christ in his Christ in the Carpenters Shop of 1850, so criticised by Dickens: '... a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-haired boy in a night-gown’ (Household Words, 15 June 1850). cxxxv Collins, Wilkie (anonymously), The Exhibition of the Royal Academy, Bentleys Miscellany, 29:174 (1851), p 624 cxxxvi Even then Coventry Patmore thought ‘the girl looked like a vulgar little slut.’ MSL British Library, Patmore to FG Stephens 30 November 1885 cxxxvii C) Rossetti, p 61 cxxxviii Anon. The Art Journal 1904, p 283. cxxxix Bowness, cat. no. 41 cxl Which leads one to suspect that the model for the head at least of the ‘hindermost savage’ in Hunt’s Converted British Family… might have been Arthur Lemprière, not Collins cxli Hunt wrote ‘…one morning in the spring [of 1851] the young lady [Siddal] appeared. I should have done more justice to my model had not circumstances occurred to hinder my work…’. (Hunt, Vol 1, pp 238-9). The ‘circumstances’ were that Hunt was conned by a plausible rogue out of £15 that he sorely needed for ‘paying models, my framemaker, and the rent….’ cxlii Hunt remembered: ‘While still a youth he imparted to me his discomfort at the striking character of his locks, and was anxious to find a way of lessening their vividness.’ Hunt, Vol 1, p 271 cxliii Ruskin’s letter to the Times 30 May 1851 cxliv When the picture came up for sale at Christie’s four years later, Collins wrote to Hunt: ‘Fancy a picture carried around by two porters while the dealers sit looking it over so that the light immediately above catches all the nobs [?] and shows where the nose used to come before it was rubbed out and painted half an inch lower….’ (Huntington Library, MSL HH 68, Collins to Hunt 7 – 14 February 1855). cxlv Huntington Library MSL Millais to Hunt 4 November 1852, quoted in Hunt, Diana Holman, p 92. cxlvi Copy of MSL Millais to Hunt January 26, 1852, Maas Archive (whereabouts of the original unknown) cxlvii Millais had used a mahogany panel for Mariana in 1851 cxlviii John Henry Newman (later Cardinal) reviewed Keble’s Lyra Innocentium: 'Well it would be for all men, could they always live the life they lived as infants, possessed of the privileges, not the responsibilities of regeneration.' (Newman, John Henry. John Keble in Essays, Critical and Historical, London: Longmans Green and Co., 1878, Vol 2, p 432). cxlix Bowness, p 16 cl Personal correspondence, December 31 2014 cli Titled by Christie’s Two Gentlemen of Verona clii Huntington Library, MSL HH 68, Collins to Hunt 7 – 14 February 1855. Hunt’s ‘Two Gentlemen’ was Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus. cliii Huntington Library, MSL HH 68, Collins to Hunt 7 – 14 February 1855