The art of scandal

It was certainly complicated. In the middle years of the 19th century, two of the most prominent figures in Victorian art – John Ruskin, critic and campaigner for the arts, and John Everett Millais, the Pre-Raphaelite painter – found themselves in a love triangle. Ruskin had proposed marriage to Euphemia Gray, daughter of a Scottish solicitor, in October 1847. He was 28 years old at the time; she was 19. It seemed unlikely that she would accept him as a husband, but later there was a change of heart. So they were married on 10 April, with the wedding taking place at her family home, Bowerswell, in Perthshire.

The early years of John and Effie’s married life followed a conventional pattern: they had plenty of money, as John’s father had a thriving business importing wine, so they lived in style in a house in Mayfair and went out in Society. Effie was admired for her beauty and her clothes and jewels (paid for from a generous ‘dress allowance’ provided by Ruskin senior); they travelled together, notably to Venice, where they made two long stays for the purpose of researching the three-volume Stones of Venice, with Effie assisting her husband with translations and the ordering of his research drawings. The couple subsequently lived in Herne Hill, close to the Ruskin family home in south-east London.

In the summer of 1853, Ruskin arranged that they should travel to the Scottish Highlands, where they and a group of friends, including the young Millais, would stay for several months at Brig O’ Turk in the Trossachs. The ostensible purpose was for Millais to paint a portrait of his host as he stood beside the Glenfinlas Burn (that painting is now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). The Ruskin marriage was by this point in trouble and, as the summer went on and Effie and Millais became more open with each other, she revealed to him that, despite having been married for five years, she remained a virgin.

She and Millais were strongly attracted to one another. Over the time that they were in Scotland together, they fell in love. In July of the following year, Ruskin and Effie’s marriage was annulled, and on 3 July 1855 she and Millais were married.

Portrait of Effie Gray

Effie Gray in 1851, when she was still married to John Ruskin

John Everett Millais, who married Effie Gray in 1855.

Sir John Everett Millais (1829-96) Forget Me Not, 1883. Estimate: £200,000 - 300,000 ($250,000 - 400,000)

This much is uncontroversial, yet questions arise. A book by Robert Brownell, entitled Marriage of Inconvenience, was published in 2013 and it offers a different perspective. His explanation for Effie’s volte-face regarding the proposal she received from Ruskin was, of course, money. Her father, George Gray, had made unwise investments in a number of speculative stocks, including Continental railway shares bought on an instalment scheme that, when the market turned against him, threatened professional and social disaster. Thus Effie, the Gray family’s eldest daughter, was urged to accept the proposal of a suitor who was known to have a good fortune and even larger expectations.

Ruskin realised that Effie had agreed to marry him at her parents’ insistence even before the wedding took place. It was impossible to change course, because of the scandal that would have been unleashed had he withdrawn his offer of marriage, but he then faced a life together with Effie into which he perhaps felt he had been tricked. From the very start of their married life, he was looking for an escape. The legal system, as it operated in the mid-19th century, made divorce very difficult, but Ruskin knew an annulment of a marriage might be granted on the grounds of non-consummation – which could offer an explanation as to why there were no sexual relations between them. This is potentially a more plausible reason than his dismay at finding that his bride had pubic hair, as earlier commentators had suggested.

There was therefore an ulterior motif in Ruskin’s invitation to Millais, and his commission for the young artist to paint his portrait in 1853; it was Ruskin’s hope and intention that, in the seclusion of the Scottish Highlands, a friendship would come about between the two younger people (Effie, born in 1828, was by then twenty-five, while Millais was a year younger), and then perhaps something more. The arrangements at the hotel at Brig O’ Turk were quite informal: Millais and Effie were allowed an unusual degree of access to one another, and especially were permitted to take long walks together. Inevitably, and as Ruskin surely intended, they confided in one another, and quite quickly fell in love.

People who have laughed at Ruskin as a cuckold – among his contemporaries and up to the present day – have regarded the events of 1853 as proof that he had no business marrying such a sweet and innocent young Scottish lass. An alternative interpretation – explained at length by Robert Brownell – is that poor old Ruskin knew that he had been duped from the start, but in the course of the five years of his marriage to Effie conceived a strategy by which he might bring the state of affairs between them to a close, and in such a way that each of them might move on. Rather than being the absurd victim of the piece, Ruskin in fact behaved with dignity and kindness – and with great good sense. Recognising the worldly aspirations of the woman to whom he had been so unsuitably wed, he set up a situation where she might start again and share her life with someone who would love her for her charm, beauty and undoubted intelligence. Thus, Effie and Millais were happily married, had many children, and together lived in the style befitting a Royal Academician (as Millais was soon to become, and even eventually President of that institution). For both – Millais himself and Effie – their desires were fulfilled.

Millais was to become an admired portraitist and painter of genre subjects. His work Forget Me Not, a portrait of John and Effie’s eldest daughter (also called Effie) from 1883, a product of the artist’s maturity, demonstrates his ineffable skill and the charm he so easily instilled in his works. The model is seated and seems self-possessed, ready to meet the challenges of life head on. It offers an image of womanhood that is imbued with mixed emotions of light-hearted intimacy but also the wistfulness of separation implied by its title – the name of a familiar wildflower of the English countryside. The portrait is offered by Bonhams in London this March.

What of Ruskin? If we venture momentarily into the question of his disturbed state of mind, we may question whether the fact that he led his entire life without achieving sexual fulfilment with man or woman should be grounds for assuming that he was without sexual feeling? Letters that Ruskin wrote to Effie in 1849, when she was in Scotland and he in Savoy, are sweetly amorous. They invoke metaphors of the purity of mountain snow to describe her loveliness, but with the safeguard that when the letters were written the couple were hundreds of miles apart, and therefore such epistolary intimacy ran no risk of upsetting his determined sexual abstinence.

Ruskin was, in truth, a deeply sensuous man, but one whose means of expression lay in his speech, writing and drawing. Few better examples of the sublimation of his emotional instincts may be seen than in his drawings of natural forms and landscape, such as his beautiful study La Cascade de la Folie, Chamouni, drawn in 1854, the year after the crisis in his marriage to Effie. In the isolation that he must have felt, and which in the later years of his life was to become an almost unendurable torment, drawings of this kind – in which he made a translation between the forms of nature and landscape, and the secret parts of a woman’s body that he might only imagine – are clues to the anguish he suffered. They are among the most personal drawings he ever made, and are works of art of sublime beauty.

Christopher Newall is an art historian, lecturer and writer.

John Ruskin (1819-1900)

John Ruskin (1819-1900) La Cascade de la Folie, Chamouni. Estimate: £40,000 - 60,000 ($50,000 - 80,000)

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