John Everett Millais
The technical virtuoso of the Pre-Raphaelites.
John Everett Millais painted Ophelia floating in a stream among botanically exact flowers. He later became a successful portrait painter.
John Everett Millais was born in Southampton in 1829. His family came from Jersey and was well off. He was a child prodigy and at eleven became the youngest student ever admitted to the Royal Academy Schools. There he met William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and in 1848 they founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood together.
Millais's early works drew fierce criticism. Christ in the House of His Parents (1849–50) in Tate shows the Holy Family as an ordinary family of craftsmen in a carpenter's workshop with wood shavings on the floor. The writer Charles Dickens wrote one of the best-known attacks on the painting. The critic John Ruskin, on the other hand, defended the Pre-Raphaelites.
His best-known work is Ophelia (1851–52) in Tate. It shows Shakespeare's Ophelia floating in a stream just before she drowns. He painted the landscape outdoors by a river in Surrey for months, flower by flower, and then had the model Elizabeth Siddal lie in a bath of water in the studio. The Pre-Raphaelites painted in clear colours on a wet white ground, which gives their pictures their luminous tone.
In 1853 Millais painted a portrait of Ruskin in Scotland. During the trip he fell in love with Ruskin's wife, Effie Gray. Her marriage to Ruskin was annulled in 1854 because it had never been consummated, and in 1855 she married Millais. They had eight children. To support the family Millais turned to a looser, more commercial style. He painted portraits, historical scenes and pictures of children. Bubbles (1886) was used in a famous soap advertisement.
Millais became one of the richest artists of his day and was made a baronet in 1885. In 1896 he became President of the Royal Academy but died the same year. He was buried in St Paul's Cathedral. His early Pre-Raphaelite works are today considered his most significant.