Page:Men of the Time, eleventh edition.djvu/804

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MILLAIS.
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lunteers—men as well as officers—was ignominiously beaten. On Oct. 31, the Turks captured the town of Alexinatz, and on the following day Beligrad was captured, thus leaving the road to Belgrade completely open. A peace was now concluded between Turkey and Servia on favourable terms to the latter. When, however, Russia made war upon Turkey, Prince Milan saw an opportunity of gaining complete independence, and a proclamation of the Servian Government, dated Dec. 14, 1877, made known that the Servian army was immediately to cross the Turkish frontier, which they did on the following day, under the command of Generals Lesjanin and Benitzki. After the dose of the war the independence of Servia was recognized, and its boundaries defined by the Treaty of Berlin (July 13, 1878). Prince Milan married, Oct. 17, 1875, Miss Natalie, daughter of the late Russian Colonel Keschko, by his wife Pulcheria, Princess of Stourdza. Servia was proclaimed a kingdom under King Milan I. on March 6, 1882. On Oct. 23, in that year, as the King and Queen were entering the cathedral of Belgrade, Madame Markovitch, widow of Lieutenant-colonel Markovitch, who had been shot for a dynastic conspiracy five years previously, fired at his Majesty, missing him and wounding a female on-looker in the thigh. The attempted assassination took place just after the Kind's return from Rustchuk, whither he had gone to visit Prince Alexander of Bulgaria. King Milan has a son, the Crown Prince Alexander, born Aug. 14, 1876.

MILLAIS, John Everett, R.A., son of John William Millais, Esq., by Mary, daughter of Richard Evermy, Esq., and widow of Enoch Hodgkinson, Esq., was born at Southampton in 1829. The family of Millais has held for centuries a place among the lesser landholders of the island of Jersey, where the name doubtless existed long prior to the Norman conquest of England. At the early age of nine he began his art education in Mr. Sass's Academy, and two years later he became a student at the Royal Academy, where he gained the principal prizes for drawing. He gained his first medal at the Society of Arts when only nine. "Pizarro seizing the Inca of Peru," his first exhibited picture, was at the Academy in 1846, followed by "Dunstan's Emissaries seizing Queen Elgiva," and a colossal cartoon at the Westminster Hall competition, "The Widow's Mite," in 1847, and the picture of "The Tribe of Benjamin seizing the Daughters of Shiloh," at the British Institution in 1848. Keat's "Isabella" was the subject of his pencil in 1849. While a student in the Academy's schools, his taste had tacitly rebelled against the routine conventions of academic teaching, and, strengthened in that feeling by such specimens of early Italian art as fell in their way, he and his friends, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, resolved to study nature as it appeared to them, not as it appeared in "the antique." These views were afterwards adopted by Charles Collins and other younger painters, who were termed, half in jest and half in earnest, the "Pre-Raphaelite School." For a short time the artists tried to enforce their views by the pen as well as the brush, in a short-lived periodical. The Germ, or Art and Poetry, which appeared in 1850. The principal works executed by Mr. Millais under the influence of his new convictions are a mystical picture of "Our Saviour," and "Ferdinand lured by Ariel," in 1850; "Mariana in the Moated Grange," and the "Woodman's Daughter," in 1851; and "The Huguenot" and "Ophelia," in 1852. Mr. Ruskin came, in 1851, to the support of the new school with enthusiastic approval, freely expressed in letters to the Times, in