John Guille Millais - Artistic Career

Artistic Career

Millais is one of the most respected of British ornithologists and bird artists, producing between 1890 and 1914 a series of books on birds and other natural history subjects. In the study of ornithology he was renowned for his portraiture of wildfowl and game birds, the subjects of his three most famous works: Natural History of British Feeding Ducks; British Diving Ducks and British Game Birds. They rank amongst the finest work on wildfowl ever published. Each bird receives individual treatment in text and detailed chromolithographs, some of which are by his friend and pre-eminent bird artist of the day Archibald Thorburn (1860–1935). Each species is represented by two or three individuals on a plate drawn in attitudes of feeding, resting and courtship.

The books are lavish and with just 400 to 600 original editions published are now prized as examples of a certain type of High Victorian grandeur. Millais’ skills are essentially Victorian, as private wealth allowed him to indulge his passions on a grand scale. He was undoubtedly tenacious. His son Raoul spoke of him as an "astonishing man and his power of concentration was such that once he took up a subject he never left it until he knew more about it than anyone in the World"

This tenacity to get a job done to the best of abilities was well-illustrated in his preparations for Mammals of Great Britain and Ireland (1904) where he spent months with the whaling fleet in the Atlantic in order to study firsthand a group of mammals that had hitherto received little attention. The work which appeared in a limited print run in 1904 also contains illustrations and chromolithographs by George Edward Lodge (1860–1954) and Archibald Thorburn.

In 1917 Millais published the first of two volumes on rhododendrons and their various hybrids. The addition was limited to 550 copies with 17 full colour plates of gardens and plants at his home, Compton Brow in Horsham. In the preface Millais explains that he began cultivating rhododendrons under the tutelage of his neighbour the naturalist and botanist Sir Edmund Loder

Millais wrote biographies of his father, John Everett Millais, and Frederick Courtney Selous. In addition he became an authority on rhododendrons, azaleas and magnolias and exhibited as a sculpturer of birds including one of fighting game birds; the sculpture is now owned by the Horsham Museum.