John Everett Millais - The Landscapes 1870-92

The Landscapes 1870-92

This fascination with wild and bleak locations is also evident in his many landscape paintings of this period, which usually depict difficult or dangerous terrain. The first of these, Chill October (1870) was painted in Perth, near his wife's family home. Chill October (Collection of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber), was the first of the large-scale Scottish Landscapes Millais painted periodically throughout his later career. Usually autumnal and often bleakly unpicturesque, they evoke a mood of melancholy and sense of transience that recalls his cycle-of-nature paintings of the later 1850s, especially Autumn Leaves (Manchester Art Gallery) and The Vale Of Rest (Tate Britain), though with little or no direct symbolism or human activity to point to their meaning. In 1870 Millais returned to full landscape pictures, and over the next twenty years painted a number of scenes of Perthshire where he was annually found hunting and fishing from August until late into the autumn each year. Most of these landscapes are autumnal or early winter in season and show bleak, dank, water fringed bog or moor, loch and riverside. Millais never returned to "blade by blade" landscape painting, nor to the vibrant greens of his own outdoor work in the early fifties, although the assured handling of his broader freer, later style is equally accomplished in its close observation of scenery. Many were painted elsewhere in Perthshire, near Dunkeld and Birnam, where Millais rented grand houses each autumn in order to hunt and fish. Christmas Eve, his first full landscape snow scene, painted in 1887, was a view looking towards Murthly castle.