Millais, John Everett
Millais, John Everett (1829–96). Painter and book illustrator. A scion of an old Norman family, settled in Jersey since the Conquest, Millais was a prodigy. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1840 and first exhibited there at 16. In 1848, with Holman Hunt and D. G. Rossetti, he founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, of which he was the most technically brilliant. Great hostility was shown to his Christ in the House of his Parents (1850). He was attacked in Blackwood's Magazine, which called the work ‘ugly, graceless and unpleasant’, and by Charles Dickens, later a friend, who thought it ‘mean, odious, revolting and repulsive’. He was defended by John Ruskin, whose former wife he married in 1855. After moving away from the Pre-Raphaelite style, he became a fashionable painter of portraits and costume history and is best known for Ophelia (1852), The Blind Girl (1856), and Bubbles (1886). Elected ARA in 1853, a full academician in 1863, and president of the RA just before his death in 1896, Millais was created baronet in 1885.
June Cochrane
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Millais, John Everett