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Eminence on Eminence. Soon he was painting the great with gentility and aplomb. "Oh, your eminence, on that eminence, if you please," he said, waving Cardinal Newman to a model's throne. "The attendant priests were somewhat scandalized when, seeing the cardinal hesitate, [Millais] added, 'Come, jump up, you dear old boy.' " In no time at all Millais was living in a luxurious house, complete with stately columns, fountains and a black marble sea lion. "Has paint done all this, Mr. Millais?" asked Carlyle, adding in his genial way, "It only shows how many fools there are in the world."
Millais' greatest success came in 1885, when he painted Bubbles, a portrait of his little grandson blowing soap bubbles. Pears' Soap bought Bubbles outright, used it as an advertisement. Result: Bubbles became one of the most famous of British paintings; Pears' became one of the world's biggest soap firms.
Millais himself became president of the Royal Academy. "I've had a good time, my boy," he said just before his death, "I have no enemies, there's no man with whom I would not shake hands—except one, and by Jove! I should like to shake him by the hand now." He meant Rossetti.
Painter & Poet. For Rossetti, Pre-Raphaelitism was a neomedieval dream of romantic love and beauty. His rich, sensuous canvases became as famous as the poems he wrote to go with them. Rossetti had married the beautiful Elizabeth who for years had served as model for the dreamy, giraffe-necked ladies he painted. When his wife died Rossetti buried his book of unpublished verses in her coffin. Years later he had to exhume his wife's coffin to recover them. Laboriously deciphering the words on the worm-eaten pages, he presented the poems to a public pre-thrilled by their funereal history.
Rossetti, who had once urged Pre-Raphaelites to "abjure bohemianism," was the most bohemian of the group. He collected "kangaroos, a wallaby, a chameleon, some salamanders, wombats, an armadillo, a marmot, a woodchuck, a deer, a jackass, a raccoon. . . ." He bought a Brahmin bull because its eyes reminded him of one of his lady friends. Even his Pre-Raphaelite brothers were gradually estranged by Rossetti's eccentricities. When the novelist George Meredith made an annoying remark, Rossetti simply threw a cup of tea in his face. But some hero-worshipers remained faithful. "Why is he not some great exiled king," said one of them, "that we might give our lives in trying to restore him to his kingdom."
Greatest satirist of the Pre-Raphaelites is artist and author Sir Max Beerbohm. His Rossetti and His Circle gently caricatured the Brotherhood's esthetic antics, helped keep their memories green. Sir Max, one of the keenest wits and sveltest exquisites of the 1890s, came into the late Victorian world when Oscar Wilde was just a lily-loving boy and Dante Gabriel Rossetti a doddering gaffer. Now something of a gaffer himself, Sir Max celebrated his 70th birthday last fortnight with London's Maximilian Society, a club formed and named in his honor.