John Everett Millais: 10 interesting facts

Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet, PRA ( MIL-ay, mil-AY; 8 June 1829 – 13 August 1896) 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 house in London, at 83 Gower Street (now number 7). Millais became the most well-known exponent of the style, his painting Christ in the House of His Parents (1849–50) generating considerable controversy, and he produced a characterize that could bolster as the embodiment of the historical and naturalist focus of the group, Ophelia, in 1851–52.

By the mid-1850s, Millais was disturbing away from the Pre-Raphaelite style to manufacture a other form of truth in his art. His far along works were unconditionally successful, making Millais one of the wealthiest artists of his day, but some former admirers including William Morris proverb this as a sell-out (Millais notoriously allowed one of his paintings to be used for a affectionate soap advertisement). While these and into the future 20th-century critics, reading art through the lens of Modernism, viewed much of his forward-looking production as wanting, this slope has tainted in recent decades, as his vanguard works have inherit be seen in the context of wider changes and liberal 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 sparkle has moreover played a significant role in his reputation. His wife Effie was formerly married to the critic John Ruskin, who had supported Millais’s at the forefront work. The annulment of the marriage and her wedding to Millais have sometimes been aligned to his fiddle with of style, but she became a powerful promoter of his action and they worked in concert to secure commissions and go ahead their social and intellectual circles.