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
- The Doll House
- O the Lark is Singing in the Sky 1864
- A Reverie
- Accepted 1853
- Sketches of Armour – Study for Henry VIII 1844
- The tribe of Benjamin seizing the daughters of Shiloh in the vineyards
- The Meeting 1860
- A head of hair for sale 1860
- Isabella – Head study of the Youth 1848
- Tennyson’s Dora – Study of Mary, Child and Dora comforting their Father 1855-56
- The Pharisee and the Publican 1864
- Three Swordhilts 1839
- Awful Protection Against Midges 1853
- Tennyson’s Edward Gray 1855 - 1856
- Sketches of Armour – Study for Henry VIII 1844
- The Head of Bran by George Meredith – Study of Seven Princes carrying the Head of Bran 1860
- Tennyson’s The Sisters – Figure Sketch 1855-56
- The Crown of Love by George Meredith – Three Studies of the Lover carrying the Princess up the Hill 1859
- Tennyson’s The Grandmother’s Apology – Figure Study 1859
- The Escape of a Heretic – Sketch of the Girl and her Lover 1857