John Everett Millais (1829-1896)

Sir John Everett Millais, English painter and illustrator, and a founding member of the artistic movement known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

In 1838 Millais went to London and at the age of 11 entered the Royal Academy schools. Extremely precocious, he won all the academy prizes. In 1848 Millais joined with two other artists, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, to form the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Brotherhood was founded in opposition to contemporary academic painting, which the group believed was the result of the example set by Raphael and which had dominated the schools and academies since his time. At the next year’s academy, the novelist Charles Dickens led a violent attack on Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents (1850), which many considered blasphemous because of its lack of idealization and seeming irreverence in the use of the mundane.

Millais’s period of greatest artistic achievement came in the 1850s. The Return of the Dove to the Ark (1851) was admired by both the English essayist and critic John Ruskin and the French author Théophile Gautier; and The Order of Release (1853), which included a portrait of his future wife Effie Gray (then unhappily married to Ruskin, whose portrait Millais also painted), was praised by Eugène Delacroix in 1855 and earned for its artist his associateship to the Royal Academy in 1853. In 1856 Millais painted one of his greatest public successes, The Blind Girl—a tour de force of Victorian sentiment and technical facility.

In 1863 Millais became full academician, and by this time his style had broadened and his content altered toward a more deliberately popular, less didactic approach. He executed illustrations for George Dalziel’s Parables (1864) and E. Moxon’s edition of Tennyson’s poems and contributed to Once a Week, Good Words and other periodicals. Millais’s later work is undoubtedly of poorer overall quality—a deterioration of which he was fully aware. In 1870 appeared the first of his pure landscapes, Chill October. Many of these landscapes are of Perthshire, where Millais shot and fished in the autumn. Many portraits belong to this late period, including those of William Gladstone, of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and of Cardinal Newman. Millais was created a baronet in 1885 and was elected president of the Royal Academy in 1896.