Millais, John Everett (1829-1896)

Portrait of the English painter John Everett Millais.

My Second Sermon, by English painter John Everett Millais. Following the end of his involvement with the Pre-Raphaelites, Millais turned to popular works more likely to please his Victorian public, though these often seem cloyingly sentimental to the modern eye.

English painter, a founder member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. Among his best known works are Ophelia (1852; National Gallery, London) and Autumn Leaves (1856; City Art Galleries, Manchester). By the late 1860s he had left the Brotherhood, developing a more fluid and conventional style which appealed strongly to Victorian tastes.

Precocious in talent, he was a student at the Royal Academy Schools at the age of 11. Early acquaintanceship with Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti led to the founding of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and, inspired by its doctrine of ‘truth to nature’, he produced some of his best works during the 1950s, among them the painting of Miss Siddell as Ophelia and Christ in the House of His Parents (1850; Tate Gallery, London); the latter caused an outcry on its first showing, since its realistic detail was considered unfitting to a sacred subject.

His marriage to Euphemia Gray in 1855 after the annulment of her marriage to John Ruskin estranged him from that early mentor and the milieu of Pre-Raphaelite idealism. His illustrations for the Moxon Tennyson (1857) and Trollope's Orley Farm (1863) show the change from Pre-Raphaelite principle to mid-Victorian Academicism. Though appealing to popular sentiment, his original style and quality disappeared from his later subject pictures and portraits, which include The Boyhood of Raleigh (1870; Tate Gallery, London) and the hugely successful Bubbles (1885), used as an advertisement by the Pears soap company. He became a baronet in 1885, and president of the Royal Academy in 1896.