Millais Exhibition - Tate Gallery

Oh how I love the pre-Raphaelites! When I lived in Manchester one of my favourite things to do was to pop into the Art Gallery, to bask in the prescence of the beautiful examples they hold there. Millais hasn't had a terribly good press in the past century or so - his Pears Soap advertising picture 'Bubbles' was viewed extremely sniffily by the arbiters of taste. Art, like many aspects of life, are subject to fashion - and Millais (along with much of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) fell out of fashion in the twentieth century. Millais, is in my view a very good artist. His landscapes are a revealation - whether a winter scene of desolation or capturing the essence of a waterfall. He is an outstanding portraitist too - his studies of Disraeli and Gladstone are the best of their kind. Bizarrely some of the figures populating his other large pictures (scenes of the life of Christ for example) often appear badly drawn or jarring. What a wonderful exhibition this was though. 9/10