Raoul MILLAIS

British, 1901-1999

One of the leading sporting artists of the 20thC

Hesketh Raoul Lejarderay Millais was born at the family home of Compton Brow in Horsham, Surrey, in 1901, the third child of John Guille (Johnny) Millais (British, 1865-1931) and the grandson of the artist, Sir John Everett Millais, Bt, PRA (British, 1829-1896).

Millais’ father was a celebrated wildlife artist, soldier, naturalist, hunter, writer and explorer, after whom a lake in Newfoundland was named, as also the Scottish ptarmigan: and his grandfather, Sir John Everett Millais was the founder of the Pre-Raphaelite movement with William Holman Hunt (British, 1827-1910) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (British, 1828-1882). The young Millais was to follow in the footsteps of both his father and grandfather in terms of his artistic talent and his love of animals and hunting (strangely perhaps, most hunters do or did ‘love’ the animals they also hunted).

His name came from the character Raoul de Nangis in the French opera Les Huguenots by Giacomo Meyerbeer. First performed in 1836 it had proved hugely popular and had inspired his grandfather to paint A Huguenot in 1851.

As a child Millais met many famous people who would visit his celebrated father. His godfather was the legendary soldier, naturalist, scout and the greatest big-game hunter in Africa, Captain F C (Frederick Courteney) Selous DSO, author of many articles and books, including A Hunter's Wanderings in Africa (acclaimed as the greatest African hunting classic of the 19thC): and the writer Hilaire Belloc who would entertain the Millais and his siblings with his comic verses.

Millais was educated at Winchester during the First World War but showed more enthusiasm for drawing and illicit shooting and fishing than for his academic studies. His absence from Science lessons, of which he attended very few, was evident in his final Science examination which he left largely blank. His explanation that this was the result of the need to supplement the meagre wartime rations by a bit of poaching did not go down well with his housemaster and he was sent to the Headmaster who described him as "unquestionably the worst man I have ever had under my jurisdiction in this college".

On leaving Winchester, Millais attended the Byam Shaw Art School in London where, he said, the students were made "to draw nothing but busts and casts". Finding this of little interest, he spent a great deal of time at The London Zoo in Regent’s Park, sketching the lions, tigers and other big cats.

In 1921 he applied to the Royal Academy Schools. He was accepted on the strength of his collection of London Zoo drawings rather than the more usual entrance examination which emphasised the importance of figure drawing. It could be suspected that his illustrious family associations may also have helped. Among his fellow students were John Rattenbury Skeaping RA (British, 1901-1980) and Doris Clare Zinkeisen ROI (Scottish, 1898-1991) and her sister Anna Katrina Zinkeisen (Scottish, 1901-1976).

In 1923 Millais travelled to Africa with his father. They spent three months there, walking more than 2,500 miles from beyond the sources of the White Nile to Bahr el Ghazal in the Sudan. The young Millais shot his first buffalo and painted some fine pictures of antelopes for his father’s book Far Away Up the Nile which was published the following year.

1924 saw Millais back in Africa, in the remote woodlands of the Central Angolan plateau, in response to a challenge from his father to secure a trophy head of the fabled Giant Sable Antelope (Hippotragus niger variani) which had been unknown to the outside world until 1916. It is found only in a remote part of Angola and its gracefully curved horns (that can reach over five feet in length) marked it out as a prize trophy for big game hunters, being regarded by many as the most magnificent antelope in Africa. Millais returned with two heads as well as typhoid and dysentery.

A Certain Curve of Horn:
The Hundred-Year Quest for the Giant Sable Antelope of Angola
by John Frederick Walker, published by Atlantic Monthly Press 2002

In 1926 Millais married the Canadian Clare Macdonnel (they were to have two sons). They settled near Malmesbury in Wiltshire and Millais applied himself to his art. He spent the next 14 years travelling throughout Britain and Ireland, painting and hunting, "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."

In 1928 he held a one-man exhibition at the Fine Art Society in London, Hunting the Fox and Big Game, and he sold all 50 pictures in his subsequent one-man show at the same gallery in 1936, Exhibition on the Horse in Pictures Decorative and Sporting. On the strength of this Millais was offered further commissions that would occupy him for several years and, with an established artistic reputation, Millais could now command very high prices - 2,000 guineas (£2,100) per painting.

Millais had always been a keen huntsman. However, his hunting career ended in 1937 following a bad fall from his favourite hunter, Greyskin whom he had come across on a mountainside in Wales three years earlier, in 1933. His owner claimed that he had won all but two of his 22 point-to-point races and was so full of energy that he often tried to go round the course again. Millais bought him for £35 and brought him back to hunt in the Beaufort country, where horse and rider rode like the wind for several seasons, only just under control. Millais recalled that he usually only managed to pull him up "just before we reached the outskirts of Bristol".

But in 1937 Greyskin trod in a hole whilst at full gallop and turned two forward somersaults. The local parson who was following Millais said that he began mentally reciting the funeral service. Millais remained in the saddle for the first somersault but the parson said that he seemed to be to be six inches shorter than before. Greyskin was unhurt but Millais broke bones in his neck and shoulder as well as dislocating his spine. (Mallais painted a picture of Greyskin after the Second World War in affectionate memory of the animal that nearly killed him but it was unfortunately stolen when thieves broke into his home in 1997. Much to Millais’ distress, the painting was never recovered).

Despite these injuries, at the outbreak of the Second World War, Millais succeeded in 'talking his way' into the British Army without the need for a medical. He obtained a commission in the Scots Guards and said that his most interesting assignment was to command the company which guarded Rudolf Hess, the deputy leader of the Nazi Party who had flown to Scotland in 1941. Millais said that Hess "spoke very good English and seemed to be the most unlikely Nazi". He drew his prisoner on several occasions and said subsequently that he always regretted that he had not visited him in Spandau Prison in West Berlin (he was convicted at the Nuremberg Trials after the war, given a life sentence, and died there in 1987).

At the request of King George VI, Millais was given official leave by his regiment in 1943 to paint two of his racehorses Big Game and Sun Chariot, both Classic winners. Among other top-class racehorses that he painted were Abernant, Airborne, Blenheim, Court Martial, Nijinsky, Tudor Minstrel and, for Sir Winston Churchill, Colonist II.

After the Second World War, and the dissolution of his marriage to Clare, in 1947 Millais purchased a beautiful, tumbledown 14thC house called Westcote Manor standing in 20 acres of grounds with wonderful views of the Evenlode Valley in the Cotswolds (near Chipping Norton, Gloucestershire). He married Kay Prior-Palmer (née Bibby) in 1949 and they were to have one son. Millais and Kay lived at Westcote Manor for the rest of their lives.

Millais' home at Westcote Manor

Although unable to ride, Millais was far from infirm and he continued to ski, shoot and stalk. He was a fine game shot but stalking was his real love and for 15 consecutive years he and Kay, a close friend of Clare, Duchess of Sutherland, would stay with the Sutherlands at their home Dunrobin Castle in Scotland, to stalk and shoot. Millais also had a studio in Scotland and travelled there frequently. Here, rather bizarrely, he kept a goldfish bowl containing the remains of a badger, two hedgehogs and a mole, all preserved in vodka.

Millais and his wife spent part of each year in Spain where they had bought a derelict property near the Andalusian coast in 1958. Having refurbished the property, they were to enjoy visits there for the next 25 years. Whilst in Spain Millais became friends with the American novelist, Ernest Hemingway, and, perhaps unsurprisingly given Hemingway’s love of bullfighting, Millais too fell under its spell. Hemingway would regale him for hours with tales of his own colourful life as well as that of his father Johnny Millais, whom Hemingway greatly admired; and the Spanish press acclaimed Millais as the best painter of bullfights since Goya (Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Spanish 1746-1828).

6ft 4in tall and distinguished looking, Millais was a man of great charm and affability, with beautiful manners, a characteristic noted by virtually everyone with whom he came in contact. The subjects he painted reflected his interests and included hunting, racing, bullfighting, stalking, shooting, fishing and skiing. He is, however, perhaps best known for his equestrian paintings and his Spanish work.

Like his friend Sir Alfred Munnings PRA (British, 1878-1959), Millais was an opponent of Modernism in art, which he called "the Picasso lark" and, surprisingly, he held few exhibitions, his last being in 1982, at the Tryon Gallery in London.

His approach to his art was refreshingly uncommercial and he was more inclined to give his pictures away to his many friends rather than sell them. As Duff Hart-Davis noted in his biography of Millais, “he painted sporting pictures with immense industry for 50 years from the Twenties to the Seventies yet he kept no records of where they went, and he gave away dozens to people who incautiously praised them. A visitor had only to say, “Isn't that marvellous!" for him to reply, "Oh, do you like it? Do have it, then."

Raoul Millais: His Life and Work
by Duff Hart-Davis, published by Swan Hill Press, 1998

Nevertheless Millais’ work is to be found in national collections in the UK and internationally as well as in the hands of many discriminating private collectors, including the great American collector, Paul Mellon, and Sir Winston Churchill, who had one of Millais' paintings on the walls of the drawing room at his home at Chartwell in Kent.

His wife, Kay, died in 1985 and Millais remained at Wescote Manor until his death at the age of 98 in 1999.

Millais wrote or illustrated several children’s book during his lifetime (Elijah and Pin-Pin, Escape to the Downs, The Donkey Derby) and a further book, Freddy Long Ears, illustrated by Millais was published posthumously. His friend, Harry, the Earl of Erne of Crom Castle, County Fermanagh, had written this story for his three children and a friend in the early 1960s and Millais offered to do some drawings for it. Nothing further came of the venture until after Millais’ death when, whilst his family were clearing Westcote Manor, they discovered a folder containing Erne’s original story and Millais’ artworks.

The book was published in 2007 and, appropriately, the launch party was held at Christie’s in St James’s. Over 400 people attended, including the members of the author’s family and members of the Millais family and many friends, including HRH the Duke of Kent.