Francis Davis Millet
Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, 1846 - 1912
Millet, Francis Davis (3 Nov. 1846-15 Apr. 1912), artist and writer, was born in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, the son of Asa Millet, a physician, and Huldah A. Byram. He served as a drummer boy in the Union army in 1864. During this time he also acted as an assistant surgeon in the Army of the Potomac, helping on one occasion to amputate a wounded soldier's arm. Millet graduated from Harvard in 1869 and was granted a master's degree in modern languages and literature three years later. Meanwhile, he worked on the Boston Advertiser and the Boston Courier and learned lithography under D. C. Fabronius. In 1870 he successfully exhibited "Beware," his third lithograph after only three months of lessons. By saving his money, Millet was able to go to Antwerp, where he studied painting at the Royal Academy with Jan van Lerius and Nicholas DeKeyser from 1871 through 1873. He won two academy prizes, one for excellence in his antique class, the other for excellence in painting. He was also publicly commended by King Leopold II of Belgium.
Because of publicity surrounding his awards, in 1873 Millet was appointed secretary to Charles Francis Adams, the head of the Massachusetts commission attending the Vienna Exposition. Adams became his close and admiring friend from that time on. At the close of the meetings, Millet traveled through the Near East, Greece, Turkey, and Hungary. He painted on Capri during that summer and studied painting in Rome during the winter of 1873-1874. He enjoyed leisurely travel through northern Italy--especially delighting in Venice--Switzerland, and Germany before returning to the United States in 1876 to be a newspaper correspondent for the Advertiser at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. He also worked as one of John La Farge's assistant muralists in decorating the Trinity Church in Boston in 1877.
In 1877 Millet was hired as a special correspondent by the New York Herald to cover the Russo-Turkish War. From vantage points with the hospitable Russian army, he worked closely with the brilliant and daring American correspondent Januarius Aloysius MacGahan, the British correspondent Archibald Forbes, and Michael Skobelev, a dashing Russian general who became Millet's closest military friend. Millet also wrote and sketched for the London Daily News, replacing Forbes in this capacity, and was employed as a special artist by the London Graphic toward the end of the war. Observing, sketching, and vividly describing combat action, he at one time told Russian officers about the location of a ford, enabling them to mount a successful surprise attack on a Turkish flank. For this act he was awarded the Cross of St. Stanislaus and the Cross of St. Anne by the Russian government. Millet advanced alongside General Joseph Gourko to Adrianople, where he was awarded the Iron Cross of Rumania. Following the Turkish surrender of Plevna, Bulgaria, in December, Millet rode into the ruined city, observed the horrific carnage there, and reported his observations graphically. At war's end in December 1877, he and MacGahan telegraphed the last major war dispatch from Constantinople to the Daily News. Millet also covered postwar and peace negotiations by the former combatants. He received three other official decorations for bravery under fire. His reports make up part of The War Correspondence of the "Daily News," 1877-78 (1878).
Soon after the war ended, Millet proceeded to Sicily and Spain and then went on to Paris, where he was active as a member of the Fine Arts jury at the Paris Exposition. He also exhibited his paintings in the Paris Salon and at the Royal Academy in London. He returned to Boston and married Elizabeth Greely Merrill in 1879; the couple had three children. Millet established a studio in nearby East Bridgewater and tried portrait painting, but he soon moved to New York City. In 1881 he accepted an assignment from Harper's Magazine to prepare art work in the Baltic Sea region, a job that took him to Denmark, Sweden, and northern Germany. He then enjoyed a sketching tour in England. In 1883 he began painting and showing Greek and Roman costume subjects, on which he later both lectured and published.
In 1884 Millet purchased a summer home at Broadway, in Worcestershire, Great Britain, and helped establish an art studio there, sharing it with Edwin Austin Abbey, Edwin Howland Blashfield, John Singer Sargent, other American colleagues, and the British artist Alfred Parsons. Millet frequently left this studio to winter in New York. In 1885 he toured widely in the American West. In 1887 he published his English translation of a French translation of Leo Tolstoy's Sebastopol; Millet's version contained an introduction by William Dean Howells. In 1888 he traveled in the United States and also in Mexico. In 1891 he took a 1,700-mile trip, partly by canoe, down the Danube River on assignment with Harper's. His companions were Parsons and the author Poultney Bigelow. Millet wrote five of the seven installments of the serial "From the Black Forest to the Black Sea" and provided sixty-six beautifully detailed illustrations of peasants, sailors, soldiers, and farm and water scenes. Bigelow wrote two other installments, and Parsons also provided many illustrations. From this work Millet created his first book, The Danube from the Black Forest to the Black Sea (1892). His second book, The Capillary Crime and Other Stories (1892), was a collection of seven short stories, some ghostly in nature. "The Capillary Crime," for example, concerns the death of an artist caused by a gun firing through force of capillary attraction.
At the Columbian Exposition in Chicago Millet was director of decorations at the White City in 1892-1893, working closely with architect and city planner Daniel H. Burnham. Millet was also director of exposition functions in 1893. Burnham and Millet then coauthored World's Columbian Exposition: The Book of the Builders, Being a Chronicle of the Origin and Plan of the World's Fair . . . (1894). Millet lived in England from 1894 to 1896, with time off to visit Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis. In 1898, during the Spanish-American War, he served in Manila as a special correspondent for Harper's Weekly, the London Times, and the New York Sun. He gathered his correspondence into his third and last book, The Expedition to the Philippines, in 1899. After a trip through the Far East, including stops in Japan, China, Java, the Straits, Burma, and India, he went on to France. He represented the United States at the Paris Exposition of 1900, supervised the decoration of the American pavilion there, was a member of the Fine Arts Jury, and was appointed Chevalier of the Legion of Honor of France.
Returning to the United States, Millet devoted a good deal of his creative energy to painting large historical murals and similar decorations. In the course of several years, he provided colorful and harmonious art work for the capitol buildings of Minnesota and Wisconsin, the Baltimore Custom House, the Court House in Newark, and the Cleveland Trust Company Building. His murals were usually ambitious but somewhat placid. The capitol in St. Paul, Minnesota, has The Treaty of the Traverse des Sioux, Millet's most ambitious single scene, depicting more than sixty figures. The Baltimore Custom House is decorated with twenty-eight panels and five lunettes. For the Cleveland bank, he and his assistants created twelve long panels depicting the pioneering movement that opened the Great West.
Millet's mural work was interrupted in 1908, when President Theodore Roosevelt's Secretary of State Elihu Root named him American commissioner general, with the temporary rank of minister plenipotentiary and envoy extraordinary, to help represent the United States at the Tokyo Exposition. Millet traveled there by way of Europe and the Siberian railway. In Tokyo he and his party had an audience with Emperor Mutsu Hito and Empress Haru. After being accorded the First-Class Order of the Sacred Treasure, he went by way of the Yangtse River and the Hankow-Peking railroad to Shanghai and Peking, studied Chinese methods of preserving art monuments, and finally returned home via Port Arthur, the Yellow Sea, and Tokyo again.
Long a member of special commissions, Millet helped create the American Federation of Arts and the National Commission of Fine Arts in 1910. He reluctantly accepted the directorship of the American Academy in Rome a year later. After serving in Rome for a short time early in 1912, he and his old friend Archibald Butt, President Howard Taft's military aide, booked passage on the Titanic in 1912 to return to the United States. They were two of the 1,513 people lost at sea when that ship sank.
Millet's war dispatches are still enormously valuable. His illustrations are regularly competent, but his abiding worth is best seen in his numerous oil canvases, which display sound draftsmanship and fine graphic placement of elements. They also demonstrate skillful use of harmonious, gentle colors suffused by mellow lighting. In their picturesqueness and rendering of costume details, furniture, bric-a-brac, and food, cutlery, and napery, they often resemble Dutch interior scenes. One such painting, At the Inn (1884, Union League Club, New York City), is representative. It shows a neatly dressed gentleman, seated at table, about to be served by a courteous young woman. Light comes through large latticed windows, and details of clothing, food, furniture, and room decorations are meticulously rendered. The canvas is exquisite but may be said to resemble an exact copy of a posed photograph. Often displaying much technical skill but little feeling, these highly adept paintings generally seem more illustrative than painterly. Millet's best works are part of many permanent collections both in the United States and abroad.
Bibliography
Many of Millet's letters are at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, and in the Butler Library of Columbia University and the Houghton Library of Harvard University. The American Federation of Arts, Francis Davis Millet Memorial Meeting (1912), lists most of his paintings and literary works. Art and Progress 3 (July 1912): 643-54, contains four memorial essays on Millet. Henry James, Picture and Text (1893), includes essays on Millet and his Broadway colleagues. Francis Hopkinson Smith, American Illustrators (1894), mentions Millet but only slightingly. Leila Mechlin, "A Decorator of Public Buildings," World's Work 19 (Dec. 1909): 12378-86, praises Millet's Cleveland Trust Company Building murals and has biographical details. See also Eugen Neuhaus, The History & Ideals of American Art (1931). Michael Quick, American Expatriate Painters of the Late Nineteenth Century (1976), pp. 114-16, 153-54, covers Millet well and contains an extensive secondary bibliography. Millet's work as a war correspondent is detailed in F. Lauriston Bullard, Famous War Correspondents (1914), and in Dale L. Walker, Januarius MacGahan: The Life and Campaigns of an American War Correspondent (1988). Millet's work at the Columbian Exposition is touched on in Charles Moore, Daniel H. Burnham: Architect, Planner of Cities (2 vols., 1921). An obituary, with portrait, is in the New York Times, 16 Apr. 1912.
Robert L. Gale
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Robert L. Gale. "Millet, Francis Davis";
http://www.anb.org/articles/17/17-00588.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
Access Date: Mon Aug 05 2013 17:03:20 GMT-0400 (Eastern Standard Time)
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