Sir John Everett Millais
Pre-Raphaelite founder turned successful realist
Sir John Everett Millais was an English painter and illustrator who was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was a child prodigy who, aged eleven, became the youngest student to enter the Royal Academy Schools. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded at his family home in London, at 83 Gower Street (now number 7). Millais became the most famous exponent of the style, his painting Christ in the House of His Parents (1849-50) generating considerable controversy, and he produced a picture that could serve as the embodiment of the historical and naturalist focus of the group, Ophelia, in 1851–52. By the mid-1850s, Millais was moving away from the Pre-Raphaelite style to develop a new form of realism in his art. His later works were enormously successful, making Millais one of the wealthiest artists of his day, but some former admirers including William Morris saw this as a sell-out (Millais notoriously allowed one of his paintings to be used for a sentimental soap advertisement). While these and early 20th-century critics, reading art through the lens of Modernism, viewed much of his later production as wanting, this perspective has changed in recent decades, as his later works have come to be seen in the context of wider changes and advanced tendencies in the broader late nineteenth-century art world, and can now be seen as predictive of the art world of the present. Millais's personal life has also played a significant role in his reputation. His wife Effie was formerly married to the critic John Ruskin, who had supported Millais's early work. The annulment of the marriage and her wedding to Millais have sometimes been linked to his change of style, but she became a powerful promoter of his work and they worked in concert to secure commissions and expand their social and intellectual circles.
Relationship Network
Master student
- Stanhope Alexander Forbes Student
Fellow student
Friend
Parent child
- John Guille Millais Child
Artworks by this artist (170 total)
- Peace Concluded 1856
- Effie Ruskin wearing a Dress decorated with natural Ornament
- An Evening Party 1846
- Female – Sketch of a distraught Woman, seated 1855-60
- Sketches of Armour – Study for Charles I 1844
- Lorenzo and Isabella 1848 - 1849
- Male – Four Profile Head Sketches of moustached Man 1850-90
- Happy Spring Time. Woman and Child Looking at Bird in Nest. 1860
- The captive 1882
- Awful Protection Against Midges 1853
- Female – Two Sketches of a Young Woman holding a Book 1855-65
- St. Agnes of Intercession
- Tennyson’s Edward Gray 1855 - 1856
- The Rejection of Cain’s Sacrifice (Genesis IV) 1842
- The Escape of a Heretic – Sketch of the Girl and her Lover 1857
- Nina, Daughter Of Frederick Lehmann, Esq. 1869
- Female – Sketch of Mother breastfeeding her Baby 1860
- The Plague of Elliant – Sketch of a Cart carrying the Dead 1859
- The Death of Romeo and Juliet – Compositional Study 1848
- Studies of a Grasshopper – Body, Head and Leg 1853