John Everett Millais

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 1851–1852. 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 Ruskin marriage and Effie's subsequent marriage to Millais have sometimes been linked to his change of style. She also became a powerful promoter of his work and they worked in concert to secure commissions and expand their social and intellectual circles.

John Everett Millais studied at Royal Academy of Arts and Heatherley School of Fine Art. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is painting, illustration and printmaking. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are history, portrait, allegory and animal art. Places of work recorded in the authority are London, Chamonix-Mont-Blanc and Paris. Positions recorded include President of the Royal Academy of Arts. Works named in the authority record are Ophelia, Christ in the House of His Parents, Isabella, Autumn Leaves, Mariana and The Order of Release. Work by John Everett Millais is recorded in the collections of Minneapolis Institute of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Auckland Art Gallery, J. Paul Getty Museum and Tate. Distinctions recorded are Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts order, Officer of the Legion of Honour, Honorary doctor of the University of Oxford and baronet.

• Honorific Prefix — Sir • Name — John Everett Millais • Born — 8 June 1829 • Birthplace — Southampton, Hampshire, England • Died — 13 August 1896 • Place of death — Kensington, London, England • Movement — Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood • Children — 8, including John Guille Millais • Field — Painting, drawing, printmaking • Training — Royal Academy of Art • Works — Ophelia; Christ in the House of His Parents

• Illustration — Photo of Millais, c. 1854 Millais was born in Southampton, England, in 1829, of a prominent Jersey-based family. His parents were John William Millais and Emily Mary Millais (née Evermy). Most of his early childhood was spent in Jersey, to which he retained a strong devotion throughout his life. The author Thackeray once asked him "when England conquered Jersey". Millais replied "Never! Jersey conquered England." The family moved to Dinan in Brittany for a few years in his childhood. His mother's "forceful personality" was the most powerful influence on his early life. She had a keen interest in art and music, and encouraged her son's artistic bent, promoting the relocating of the family to London to help develop contacts at the Royal Academy of Art. He later said "I owe everything to my mother." In 1840, his artistic talent won him a place at the Royal Academy Schools at the still unprecedented age of eleven. While there, he met William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti with whom he formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (known as the "PRB") in September 1847 in his family home on Gower Street, off Bedford Square.

Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents (1849–50) was highly controversial because of its realistic portrayal of a working class Holy Family labouring in a messy carpentry workshop. Later works were also controversial, though less so. Millais achieved popular success with A Huguenot (1851–52), which depicts a young couple about to be separated because of religious conflicts. He repeated this theme in many later works. All these early works were painted with great attention to detail, often concentrating on the beauty and complexity of the natural world. In paintings such as Ophelia (1851–52) Millais created dense and elaborate pictorial surfaces based on the integration of naturalistic elements. This approach has been described as a kind of "pictorial eco-system". Mariana is a painting that Millais painted in 1850–51 based on the play Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare and the poem of the same name by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from 1830. In the play, the young Mariana was to be married, but was rejected by her betrothed when her dowry was lost in a shipwreck. This style was promoted by the critic John Ruskin, who had defended the Pre-Raphaelites against their critics. Millais's 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. Despite having been married to Ruskin for several years, Effie was still a virgin. Her parents realised something was wrong and she filed for an annulment. • Illustration — Mariana, 1851 • Illustration — The Return of the Dove to the Ark (1851) Ashmolean Museum, Oxford • Illustration — Ophelia (1851–52) Tate Britain, London • Illustration — The Order of Release (1852–53) Tate Britain, London

• Illustration — Photo assemblage of Millais's family c. 1870. Names in full size image. In 1855, after her marriage to Ruskin was annulled, Effie and John Millais married. He and Effie eventually had eight children: Everett, born in 1856; George, born in 1857; Effie, born in 1858; Mary, born in 1860; Alice, born in 1862; Geoffroy, born in 1863; John in 1865; and Sophie in 1868. Their youngest son, John Guille Millais, became a naturalist, wildlife artist, and Millais's posthumous biographer. Their daughter Alice (1862–1936), later Alice Stuart-Worsley after she married Charles Stuart-Worsley, was a close friend and muse of the composer Edward Elgar, and is thought to have been an inspiration for themes in his Violin Concerto. Effie's younger sister Sophie Gray sat for several pictures by Millais, prompting some speculation about the nature of their apparently fond relationship.

• Illustration — The North-West Passage (1874) Tate Britain, London • Illustration — Cherry Ripe (1879), Private Collection After his marriage, Millais began to paint in a broader style, which was condemned by Ruskin as "a catastrophe". It has been argued that this change of style resulted from Millais's need to increase his output to support his growing family. Unsympathetic critics such as William Morris accused him of "selling out" to achieve popularity and wealth. His admirers, in contrast, pointed to the artist's connections with Whistler and Albert Moore, and influence on John Singer Sargent. Millais himself argued that as he grew more confident as an artist, he could paint with greater boldness. In his article "Thoughts on our Art of Today" (1888), he recommended Velázquez and Rembrandt as models for artists to follow. Paintings such as The Eve of St. Agnes and The Somnambulist clearly show an ongoing dialogue between the artist and Whistler, whose work Millais strongly supported. Other paintings of the late 1850s and 1860s can be interpreted as anticipating aspects of the Aesthetic Movement. Many deploy broad blocks of harmoniously arranged colour and are symbolic rather than narratival. From 1862, the Millais family lived at 7 Cromwell Place, Kensington, London. Later works, from the 1870s onwards demonstrate Millais's reverence for Old Masters such as Joshua Reynolds and Velázquez. Many of these paintings were on an historical theme. Notable among these are The Two Princes Edward and Richard in the Tower (1878) depicting the Princes in the Tower, The Northwest Passage (1874) and the Boyhood of Raleigh (1871). Such paintings indicate Millais's interest in subjects connected to Britain's history and expanding empire. Millais also achieved great popularity with his paintings of children, notably Bubbles (1886) – famous, or perhaps notorious, for being used in the advertising of Pears soap – and Cherry Ripe. Three red-haired young girls who modelled as Scottish peasant girls in his painting An Idyll of 1745, were Hetty, Lily and Rose Pettigrew from Portsmouth in their first modelling roles, who became well-known models in late nineteen century London. His last project (1896) was to be a painting entitled "The Last Trek". Based on his illustration for his son's book, it depicted a hunter lying dead in the veldt, his body contemplated by two onlookers.

• Illustration — Millais later in his career His many landscape paintings of this period usually depict difficult or dangerous terrain. The first of these, Chill October (1870, Collection of Andrew Lloyd Webber), was painted in Perth, near his wife's family home. It was the first of the large-scale Scottish landscapes Millais painted periodically throughout his later career. Usually autumnal and often bleakly unpicturesque, they evoke a mood of melancholy and sense of transience that recalls his cycle-of-nature paintings of the later 1850s, especially Autumn Leaves (Manchester Art Gallery) and The Vale of Rest (Tate Britain), though with little or no direct symbolism or human activity to point to their meaning. • Illustration — John Everett Millais by J. P. Mayall from Artists at Home, photogravure, published 1884, Department of Image Collections, National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC In 1870 Millais returned to full landscape pictures, and over the next twenty years painted a number of scenes of Perthshire where he was annually found hunting and fishing from August until late into the autumn each year. Most of these landscapes are autumnal or early winter in season and show bleak, dank, water-fringed bog or moor, loch, and riverside. Millais never returned to "blade by blade" landscape painting, nor to the vibrant greens of his own outdoor work in the early fifties, although the assured handling of his broader, freer later style is equally accomplished in its close observation of scenery. Many were painted elsewhere in Perthshire, near Dunkeld and Birnam, where Millais rented grand houses each autumn to hunt and fish. Christmas Eve, his first full landscape snow scene, painted in 1887, was a view looking towards Murthly Castle.

• Illustration — John Everett Millais (1905), Thomas Brock, Tate Britain Millais was elected as an associate member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1853; a decade later in 1863, he was elected as a full member of the Academy, in which he was a prominent and active participant. In July 1885, Queen Victoria created him a baronet, of Palace Gate, in the parish of St Mary Abbot, Kensington, in the county of Middlesex, and of Saint Ouen, in the Island of Jersey, making him the first artist to be honoured with a hereditary title.

Between 1881 and 1882, Millais was elected and acted as the president of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists. After the death of Lord Leighton in 1896, Millais was elected President of the Royal Academy. He died later in the same year from throat cancer. He was buried in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral.

• Illustration — Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru (1846) • Illustration — A Huguenot on St Bartholomew's Day (1851–52) • Illustration — Mrs Coventry Patmore (Emily Augusta Patmore) (1851) Fitzwilliam Museum • Illustration — The Rescue, (1855) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne • Illustration — The Vale of Rest (1858–59) Tate Britain, London • Illustration — Bright Eyes (1877), Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums Collection • Illustration — The Black Brunswicker (1860) • Illustration — Parable - The Leaven (c. 1860), Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums Collection • Illustration — Parable - The Hidden Treasure (c. 1860), Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums Collection • Illustration — Parable - The Pharisee and the Publican (c. 1860), Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums Collection • Illustration — The Eve of St Agnes (1863) Royal Collection • Illustration — Charlie Is My Darling, 1864 • Illustration — Esther (1865) Private Collection • Illustration — Vanessa (1868) Liverpool Museums Service • Illustration — Chill October (1870), private collection • Illustration — A Flood (1870), Manchester Art Gallery • Illustration — The Knight Errant (1870), Tate Britain • Illustration — The Martyr of the Solway (1871), Walker Art Gallery • Illustration — Hearts are Trumps (1872), Tate Britain • Illustration — Portrait of Effie Millais (1873), Perth Museum and Art Gallery • Illustration — The Yeoman of the Guard (1876) • Illustration — The Sound of Many Waters (1876) • Illustration — A Jersey Lily (1878) • Illustration — The Princes in the Tower (1878), Royal Holloway College • Illustration — Princess Elizabeth in Prison at St James's (1879), Royal Holloway College • Illustration — Louise Jane Jopling (1879) National Portrait Gallery (London) • Illustration — Portrait of William Ewart Gladstone (1879) • Illustration — Self-portrait (1881) • Illustration — Portrait of Benjamin Disraeli (1881) National Portrait Gallery • Illustration — Portrait of Alfred Tennyson (1881) • Illustration — John Henry Newman (1881) National Portrait Gallery (London) • Illustration — Portrait of the Marquess of Salisbury (1883) • Illustration — An Idyll of 1745 (1884). The three female artists models on the right were the sisters Lily Pettigrew (1870–1920); Hetty Pettigrew (1867–1953) and Rose Pettigrew (1872–1905) • Illustration — Earl of Rosebery (1886) • Illustration — Portia (1886) • Illustration — Christmas Eve (1887) • Illustration — Portrait of Arthur Sullivan (1888) • Illustration — The Grey Lady (1888) Private Collection • Illustration — Glen Birnam (1891) • Illustration — Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind (1892)

The authorities additionally record the headings Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet, Sir John Everett Millais, John E. Millais, John Everett Millais (Sir) and Sir John Everett Millais, Bt. His recorded language was English. He was the child of John William Millais and Mary Emily Evamy. He married Effie Gray. 4 children are recorded: John Guille Millais, Sir Everett Millais, 2nd Baronet, George Gray Millais and Effie Gray Millais.

John Everett Millais worked in painting, illustration and printmaking. His work is associated with Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Symbolism. Recorded position is President of the Royal Academy of Arts. He belonged to Royal Academy of Arts, Académie des beaux-arts, Royal Society of Portrait Painters and Academy of Arts, Berlin. He worked at London, Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, Paris and Italy.

Works recorded as notable number 8: Ophelia, Christ in the House of His Parents, Isabella, Autumn Leaves, Mariana, The Order of Release, The Vale of Rest and The Black Brunswicker. His recorded genres are history, portrait, allegory and animal art.

Happy Spring Time. Recorded as having studied at Royal Academy of Arts and Heatherley School of Fine Art. Within the Encyclopedia. Connected to 1 other published record in the VALÉORINE Encyclopedia.