He found a much more appropriate field for the exercise of his particular capacities by turning to landscape painting. Many of his earlier figure compositions had been given backgrounds which showed how well he could manage the complex details of masses of tangled vegetation, or the broad and simple lines of a piece of rural scenery; but in 1871 he attempted for the first time a landscape which was complete in itself and not merely incidental in a picture mainly concerned with human interest. This landscape, "Chill October," was at the Academy with his "Yes or No?" "Victory, O Lord," "A Somnambulist," and the "Portrait of George Grote," and it was welcomed by a host of admirers as a new revelation of his versatility. It has certainly qualities which justify the estimation in which it was and is still held; and though it lacks that imaginative insight into poetic subtleties which accounts for so much in the work of a master like Turner, it must always claim the respect of art lovers as a large, dignified, and sincere study of nature in one of her sadder moods. It is the reserve of the picture, its reticent realism, that chiefly makes it memorable, for it is neither imposing in subject nor striking in effect; but in its broad simplicity there is something rarely fascinating. Other nature studies of the same character followed at brief intervals during the next few years; they added to the interest of the artist's practice, but they can scarcely be said to have equalled in importance the portraits and figure subjects which he completed at this stage of his career. Millais was, of course, far too great a master to have failed in any branch of artistic practice to which he seriously devoted himself, but the very capacities which made him so successful as a painter of the human subject prevented him from looking at open-air nature with the necessary degree of abstraction. The physical character of a piece of scenery, its details and individual peculiarities, he could record with absolute certainty, though the elusive subtleties of atmosphere, and the charming accidents of illumination, which mean so much in the poetic rendering of landscape, he dwelt upon hardly at all. In many of his landscapes the breadth and dignity, the accurate relation of part to part, the fascinating simplicity of manner, which are among the greater merits of "Chill October," can be praised without reservation or hesitation; but the touch of fantasy, of actual unreality, by which the inspired landscape painter seems to suggest more truly the real spirit of nature, he hardly ever attempted; and never, it may fairly be said, with complete success. [Illustration: PLATE VII.--OPHELIA (Tate Gallery)