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RAOUL MILLAIS |
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 and the grandson of the artist Sir John Everett Millais. He 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 Headmaster describing him as "unquestionably the worst man I have ever had under my jurisdiction in this college". On leaving Winchester, he attended the Byam Shaw Art School in London where, he said, the students were made "to draw nothing but busts and casts" and, 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 and was accepted on the strength of his collection of London Zoo drawings. In 1923 Millais spent three months in Africa with his father, a celebrated wildlife artist, soldier, naturalist, hunter, writer, and explorer. They walked more than 2,500 miles from the source of the White Nile to the Sudan and the young Millais painted some fine pictures of antelopes for his father's book Far Away Up the Nile which was published the following year. Millais was back in Africa the following year, in the remote woodlands of the Central Angolan plateau, in response to a challenge from his father to find the fabled Giant Sable Antelope which had been unknown to the outside world until 1916. He succeeded. Returning to England he applied himself to his art and held a one-man exhibition at the Fine Art Society in London in 1928, Hunting the Fox and Big Game, and he sold all 50 pictures in his subsequent one-man show at the same gallery in 1936. With an established artistic reputation, Millais could now command 2000 guineas (£2,100) per painting. In the Second World War Millais served in the Scots Guards and later 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. And, in 1943, at the request of King George VI, Millais was given official leave by his regiment to paint two of the king's racehorses Big Game and Sun Chariot, both Classic winners. Among other top-class racehorses that he later painted were Abernant, Airborne, Blenheim, Court Martial, Nijinsky, Tudor Minstrel and, for Sir Winston Churchill, Colonist II. After the Second World War Millais purchased a beautiful, tumbledown 14thC house called Westcote Manor in the Cotswolds. With his second wife, Kay Prior-Palmer, he divided his time between England and Spain, where he bought a property near the Andalusian coast in 1958. It was here that he met and became close friends with Ernest Hemingway, the American novelist. Not unsurprisingly perhaps, given Hemingway's love of bullfighting, Millais too fell under its spell; and the Spanish press subsequently acclaimed Millais as the best painter of bullfights since Goya. 6ft 4in tall and distinguished looking, Millais was a man of great charm and affability, with beautiful manners, a characteristic noted by almost everyone with whom he came into contact. He painted subjects that reflected his interests, including hunting, racing, bullfighting, stalking, shooting, fishing, skiing and "the elegant occasions in life". Like his friend the artist Sir Alfred Munnings, he opposed Modernism in art, which he called "the Picasso lark", and, surprisingly, he held few exhibitions, his last being at the Tryon Gallery in London in 1982. His approach to 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 (Raoul Millais: His Life and Work, published by Swan Hill Press, 1998), "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." 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. Millais died at the age of 98 in 1999 at his home in the Cotswolds, which is now the home of the film and stage director Sam Mendes, and his wife the actress, Kate Winslet. Please feel free to forward this email to anyone you think might be interested. With best wishes
CHRIS NOEL-JOHNSON |
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