For my weekly writing spot on this site, see the One-Minute Mystic, with a new meditation posted every Monday. Also see The Village, the story of Misty Longings, England's most beautiful village, posted episode by episode earlier this year.       He painted Gladstone, Disraeli, Scottish landscapes, pretty girls and bible scenes; he met Van Gogh in the street, chatted with Dickens, and Queen Victoria regularly had private viewings of his work. He was also the first major artist to sell his work to advertising. The Millais exhibition finally closed last week at London's Tate gallery. Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896) rather dropped off the artistic radar in the 20th century. Both rich and lauded in the 19th, "the greatest of British artists", Millais didn't have modernist credentials. Dali may have been a fan of his "Ophelia" – the dead woman floating – but he was just too English, too bourgeois to be a hero of the New Art. Instead of cutting off his ear, he went shooting and fishing in the Highlands; for Picasso et al, he lacked even a basic grasp of psychic fracture and social alienation. He could, however, paint. As an excited Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, "Once I met the painter Millais in the street in London, just after I had been lucky enough to see several of his paintings." It was Millais' expansive landscapes that particularly gripped Vincent. Here was a man unafraid of big distance, unframed by compositional elements. For Van Gogh, Millais took you into the landscape. No longer the viewer, you became as one with the scene. Could this really be the same man who painted the curly haired boy blowing bubbles in Pears Soap advert? Millais did not completely avoid scandal. While painting her portrait, he fell in love with the wife of his friend John Ruskin. Effy then divorced Ruskin on the grounds of an unconsummated marriage, with "incurable impotency" given as explanation. Millais and Effy duly wed, with the painter showing no signs of impotency himself. They had eight children together. His religious painting was controversial. Dickens was most upset by the depiction of Mary in "The Carpenter's Shop" – "so horrible in her ugliness", as he wrote. Others were offended by the anatomical accuracy in the picture. Such accuracy was fine for surgeons, but not something to be encouraged in art – particularly not religious art. Saints didn't have thin arms. Meanwhile the Protestants were furious at the possible High Church interpretation attached to the piece. No wonder Millais ended up painting Scottish landscapes, where you just had midges or cold to contend with. Of course the Pears Soap story rumbled on. By colluding with commerce, was he selling his soul, or democratising art? But his body of work transcended such spats, and he was buried in St Paul's Cathedral's Painters Corner. Holman Hunt was one of his pallbearers. We close with his reflections on the odour of the burning autumnal leaves: "To me, nothing brings back sweeter memories of days that are gone; it is the incense offered by despairing summer to the sky, and it brings one a happy conviction that Time puts a peaceful seal on all that is gone." More writings © Simon Parke