He came from a Jersey family, but was born in Southamptom. At age 11, he entered the Royal Academy Schools where he stayed for six years. His remarkable Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru, painted when he was only sixteen, was exhibited at the Academy in 1846.

While at the Academy, he met William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti with whom he formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848.

In the following year the Pre-Raphaelites were greeted by a hostile reception for their pictures, which included Millais' Christ in the House of his Parents. It was highly controversial because of its realistic portrayal of a working class Holy Family labouring in a messy carpentry workshop. Further critical attacks followed in the next few years. At this point Ruskin was persuaded to intervene and the worst criticisms of the Pre-Raphaelite work gave way to lukewarm enthusiasm.

In 1852, he completed Ophelia, his best known work today. The model was Elizabeth Siddall, who nearly died from a fever caught while modelling in a freezing water for hours for the painting. Indeed, her father tried to sue Millais for her getting ill afterwards. The background was painted along the banks of the Hogsmill river, near Tolworth, South London, at a place called Six Acre Meadow, alongside Church Road Old Malden. Ophelia was the character from Shakespeare's play Hamlet, singing while floating in a river just before her death by drowning.

Also in 1852 Millais' The Huguenot gained great success at the Academy, and in 1853 he was elected an A.R.A.. Rossetti regarded this defection to the establishment as marking the end of Millais' association with the Pre-Raphaelites.

Millais' friendship with Ruskin introduced him to Ruskin's wife Effie. Soon after they met she modelled for his painting The Order of Release. As Millais painted Effie they fell in love. In 1856, after her marriage to Ruskin was annulled, Effie and John Millais married.

Few Pre-Raphaelite works followed The Huguenot. The Blind Girl and Autumn Leaves were completed by 1856 and shown at the Academy in that year. He spent the years between 1857 and 1870, when the first of the popular subject-pictures, The Boyhood of Raleigh was painted, on literary, historical and genre pictures, more or less. Some of these enjoyed considerable popular success, for example The Black Brunswicker and the two Sermon pictures.

From 1870 the subject pictures were interspersed with highly successful society portraits painted with great fluency and accuracy. They were precisely what the sitters required and expected and, in turn, Millais became wealthy beyond the wildest dreams; but they were a lifetime away from his early artistic promise.

In 1886, the year after he had been created a Baronet, one hundred and fifty-nine of Millais' works were shown at an exhibition in the Grosvenor Gallery.

In 1896, Millais, who was also a very successful book illustrator, was elected President of the Royal Academy, but he died later in the same year from throat cancer.




//Gallery//
JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS

//MILLAIS STATUE, TATE, PHOTOS//

John Everett Millais
Portrait of Henry Irving