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Home , A Huguenot, Claudio and Isabella, Frederick Sandys, Frederic George Stephens, Frederic Leighton, John Everett Millais

Sir , Bart, P.R.A.

Ferdinand Lured by Ariel 1849-1850

Oil on panel, 64.8 x 50.8 cm (arched top)

Signed and dated in monogram, lower left, JEMillais / 1849

Exhibited: Royal Academy 1850, no. 504; Royal Scottish Academy 1854, no. 322; Fine Art Society, , ‘The Collected Works of John Everett Millais’ 1881, no. 2; Grosvenor Gallery, London, ‘Exhibition of the Works of Sir John E. Millais, Bart, R.A.’ 1886, no. 78; Guildhall, London, ‘Loan Collection of Pictures by Painters of the British School who have flourished during Her Majesty’s Reign’ 1897, no. 131; Royal Academy, ‘Works by the Late Sir John Everett Millais’ 1898, no. 58; Carfax Gallery, London, ‘A Century of Art, 1810-1910’ 1911, no. 48; Gallery, ‘Works by the English Pre-Raphaelite Painters Lent by the Art Gallery Committee of the Birmingham Corporation’ 1911-12, no. 14; Tate Gallery, ‘Paintings and Drawings of the 1860s Period’ 1923, no. 86; Royal Academy, ‘Exhibition of British Art c. 1000-1860’ 1934, no. 566; Birmingham City Art Gallery, ‘The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’ 1947, no. 51; Whitechapel Gallery, ‘The Pre-Raphaelites: A Loan Exhibition of their Paintings and Drawings held in the Centenary Year of the Foundation of the Brotherhood’ 1948, no. 44; Royal Academy and , Liverpool, ‘Millais P.R.B./ P.R.A.’ 1967, no. 23; King’s Lynn, ‘The Pre-Raphaelites as Painters and Draughtsmen, a Loan Exhibition from Two Private Collections’ 1971, no. 54; Tate Gallery, ‘The Pre-Raphaelites’ 1984, no. 24; Frick Collection, New York, ‘Victorian Fairy Painting’ 1998-9, ex-cat.; Yale Center for British Art and Huntingdon Library, San Marino, ‘Great British Paintings from American Collections: Holbein to Hockney’ 2001-2, no. 57; Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara and Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, ‘Shakespeare in Art’ 2003, no. 82; , Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, ‘Millais’ 200708, no. 15; Tate Britain, of Art, Washington, Pushkin Museum, Moscow, ‘Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde’, 2012-13, no. 33

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Is it of outstanding aesthetic importance?

Ferdinand Lured by Ariel epitomizes the of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, by one of its foremost exponents. Millais was widely recognized as the most naturally gifted artist of his generation, the youngest ever student at the Royal Academy Schools, where he won a silver medal for drawing in 1843 and a gold medal for painting in 1847. Together with the painters , , , and the sculptor , Millais founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood at his parents’ house in Gower Street in September 1848. Their declared aims were to express genuine ideas, to study nature attentively, to avoid convention, and to produce good works of art. The Brotherhood was very closely knit for fewer than five years, and gradually drifted apart. In fact, Rossetti completed only two paintings according to Pre- Raphaelite principles before turning to lush watercolours. In 1852, Woolner left for Australia, and two years later, Holman Hunt set out to paint from nature in the Holy Land. ‘Pre- Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde’ (2012), were completely radical. There is a singularity of purpose in their early pictures which is almost unparalleled in the history of British art, when the traditional genre of , which required an elevated and moral subject, was renewed in a completely radical fashion, as was emphasised in the Tate’s survey in 2012, ‘Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant Garde’. Ferdinand Lured by Ariel was Millais’s first work which followed the Pre-Raphaelite precept of painting nature outdoors. Most of the background was executed during the summer of 1849, while Millais was staying with a friend at Shotover Park near . He wrote to Holman Hunt that it was ‘ridiculously elaborate. I think you will find it very minute, yet not near enough so for nature. To paint as it ought to be it would take me a month a weed; as it is, I have done every blade of grass and leaf distinct’. F.G. Stephens modelled for the figure of Ferdinand, whose pose and costume were taken from Camille Bonnard’s Costumes historiques, a favourite source for the Pre-Raphaelites. The subject was taken from by Shakespeare, one of the Brotherhood’s Immortals. Having been shipwrecked on Prospero’s enchanted island, Ferdinand is lured by Ariel, the magician’s servant, towards his master, by whispering that the prince’s father has been drowned. The sprite lifts Ferdinand’s hat to whisper into his ear, while his bat-like companions mimic the prince’s confusion. As in the celebrated portrait of , completed in 1854 and showing a similarly elaborate and detailed background painted outdoors (), the figure of Ferdinand appears to have been superimposed on his surroundings. Nevertheless, the intensity of observation and the virtuosity of execution is only equalled, but not surpassed, by that of (R.A. 1852; Tate Britain).

When the painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1850, it baffled the critics. Although they reserved most of their opprobrium for Millais’s other submission, Christ in the House of his Parents (Tate Britain), which elicited the famous attack by Charles Dickens, they noted that Ferdinand was ‘less offensive in point of subject and feeling, but scarcely more pardonable in style’; or that ‘it would occupy more room than the thing is worth to expose the absurdity and impertinence of this work’. The original purchaser, Richard Ellison, may well have been non-plussed, having bought the picture before the exhibition; and it should be remembered that this was a whole year before John Ruskin wrote his celebrated letters to and became, in effect, the first champion of the Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Nevertheless, the unique importance of the painting has been frequently recognised, not least by Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon when they were preparing the exhibition ‘A Century of Art, 1810-1910’ for the International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers in 1911. In requesting the loan of the picture, their associate, Robert Ross, the most devoted friend of Oscar Wilde, wrote to H.F. Makins that ‘I regard it not only as a major example of Millais, but as a unique picture in European art, and there is literally nothing to take its place… The idea of the exhibition would be to pit with the French, and Ferdinand is just one of the pictures beside which the Continent has nothing to show’. (Makins duly lent.)

Ferdinand Lured by Ariel is one of only four major works by Millais painted during the lifetime of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to remain in private hands; the others are Portrait of a Gentleman and his Daughter (R.A. 1850; Lord Lloyd-Webber); , on St Bartholomew’s Day, refusing to shield himself from danger by wearing the Roman Catholic badge (R.A. 1852; The Makins Collection); and The Proscribed Royalist (R.A. 1853; Lord Lloyd-Webber). Of these, Ferdinand is undoubtedly the most imaginative and the most original.

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Is it of outstanding significance for the study of some particular branch of art, learning, or history?

Ferdinand Lured by Ariel is of outstanding significance for the study of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the wider and much misunderstood Pre-Raphaelite movement, and for the study of Victorian art in general. It relates directly to a peculiarly English genre, the fairy painting. Yet, as W.M. Rossetti remembered of the R.A. exhibition in 1850, that while ‘the exhibition world was full of pictures of fairies and attendant spirits, these, without exception, were conceived as trivial human pigmies’. Millais, at one burst, treated them as elfin creatures…’ The exhibition of ‘Victorian Fairy Painting’ in 1998 made abundantly clear how original Millais’s picture is, when compared with obsessively ‘surreal’ work of Richard Dadd, the operatic scene-setting of Sir ’s two subjects from A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream, and, especially, the work of specialists in the genre such as John Anster Fitzgerald and the Doyle brothers, Richard and Charles. The inclusion of the painting in the exhibition of ‘Shakespeare in Art’, demonstrated its importance for this theme, the study of which has by no means been exhausted.

It might also be argued that the painting is of outstanding importance for the study of the history of collecting. The Makins Collection, which has never been properly researched, is the work of three generations of the family, and probably constitutes the most important group of Pre-Raphaelite pictures remaining in private hands. It was founded by Henry Francis Makins, who is described in the Survey of London as a barrister and ‘collector and connoisseur, particularly of his old neighbour in Palace Gate, Millais’. In addition to Ferdinand Lured by Ariel, which he bought at Agnew’s in 1886 for his new house, designed by Norman Shaw, at 180 Queen’s Gate, he also owned Millais’s (R.A. 1851; acquired in 1883, now in the Tate). Among later additions by Millais to the collection were and L’Enfant du Regiment (R.A. 1856; acquired in 1946 and now in the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven); and A Huguenot, on St Bartholomew’s Day, refusing to shield himself from danger by wearing the Roman Catholic Badge (R.A. 1852, acquired in 1972 and still in the Makins Collection). Among other Pre-Raphaelite paintings in the Makins Collection are Holman Hunt’s Blackheath Park (1848, acquired in 1973); the first study for (1850-52; acquired in 1934); the study for Valentine Reproaching Proteus for his Falsity (1852; acquired 1973); the small version of (1853, acquired in 1957). H.F. Makins also owned important works by many other contemporary artists, including , George Frederick Watts, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and . He was not, however, invariably discerning, and also acquired conventional watercolours by lesser artists such as Copley Fielding and Myles Birket Foster.

H.F. Makins married Kezia Elizabeth Hunt, the second daughter of John Hunt of Hunt and Roskell, the leading jewellers in the Victorian period. Together, they collected important jewellery, including the probably the earliest examples of Japanese-inspired Cloisonne enamel by Lucien Falize, bought at the Universal Exhibition in 1867 (now in the Ashmolean Museum).

The collecting activities of the Makins family, as well as their political and public service, are amply documented in the Makins papers in the Bodleian Library, for example H.F. Makins’s receipts and correspondence with dealers and artists (including Millais) are in MS Sherfield 72. Their study is long overdue, for, whilst not as extensive or as famous as the pioneering collections of Pre-Raphaelite art formed by (in the Ashmolean Museum) and James Leathart (dispersed in 1896), it deserves to be much better known. In 1987, having been approached by the New York dealer Richard Feigen, he wrote categorically that ‘I cannot foresee a situation in which this picture would be on the market’.