Art In The Field

Raoul Millais came from a family adept at capturing the spirit of the age on canvas. It is time his work was re-evaluated, suggests Janet Menzies

- Janet Menzies

WHEN your grandfather was a founder member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and created such famous works as Christ in the House of His Parents and Ophelia, surely it’s hard to make your mark as an artist? The Millais family seems to have had no problem with this, with each succeeding generation adding to the Millais mythology.

Raoul Millais, grandson of Sir John Everett Millais, was born near Horsham, West Sussex, in 1901. Millais painted hunters and hunting, racehorses, matadors and their bulls, big-game hunting and all the glamorous and beautiful people engaged in sport. To capture that life, Millais required to live it. He was a contemporary of Ernest Hemingway and spent time with the writer in Spain, where he sketched the corrida, a shared love. His father, John Guille  “Johnny” Millais, a naturalist writer and painter, took him to Africa in his twenties – a trip that saw him walk 2,500 miles and shoot his first Cape buffalo. And, of course, Millais hunted. He confessed: “I managed to persuade the taxman that to keep three horses and pay a groom’s wages and a hunt subscription were essential to my profession as a painter, which indeed they were. So the proceeds from my pictures made enough money to buy and keep horses.”