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Lot Essay
A painter of rustic genre scenes and animals, especially horses, Millner lived all his life in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire. His father, who had the same forenames and who died in 1870, was also a local artist and teacher; he exhibited two pictures at the British Institution in 1845.
Millner exhibited eleven pictures at the Royal Academy between 1869 and 1896 (the last posthumously). Nearly all were genre scenes inspired by the day-to-day life of the Lincolnshire farming community. He is represented in the Tate by a single picture, A Wayside Gossip, dated 1872, and there are a number of paintings at the Gainsborough Old Hall Museum in his native town.
The present example is an early work, probably dating from about 1870-72, shortly after he began to exhibit at the Royal Academy at the age of twenty. The Tate's Wayside Gossip is comparable in style; so is The End of the Day, also dated 1872, which was sold in these rooms on 23 March 1984, lot 79. Delicately handled and sensitive in feeling, these pictures clearly show Pre-Raphaelite influence, and might be described as a vernacular and, for their date, somewhat old-fashioned expressions of the idiom. Such pictures would normally be expected to date from the 1850s, when the walls of the Royal Academy were peppered with painstaking works by young artists inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites and their champion, John Ruskin. That Millner was still practising this style some fifteen years later suggests how long it took for metropolitan values to penetrate to rural Lincolnshire.
Millner exhibited eleven pictures at the Royal Academy between 1869 and 1896 (the last posthumously). Nearly all were genre scenes inspired by the day-to-day life of the Lincolnshire farming community. He is represented in the Tate by a single picture, A Wayside Gossip, dated 1872, and there are a number of paintings at the Gainsborough Old Hall Museum in his native town.
The present example is an early work, probably dating from about 1870-72, shortly after he began to exhibit at the Royal Academy at the age of twenty. The Tate's Wayside Gossip is comparable in style; so is The End of the Day, also dated 1872, which was sold in these rooms on 23 March 1984, lot 79. Delicately handled and sensitive in feeling, these pictures clearly show Pre-Raphaelite influence, and might be described as a vernacular and, for their date, somewhat old-fashioned expressions of the idiom. Such pictures would normally be expected to date from the 1850s, when the walls of the Royal Academy were peppered with painstaking works by young artists inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites and their champion, John Ruskin. That Millner was still practising this style some fifteen years later suggests how long it took for metropolitan values to penetrate to rural Lincolnshire.