John Everett Millais
Sir John Everett Millais, (8 June 1829 - 13 August 1896) was an English artist from a prominent Jersey-based family. He was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Early life
Millais was born in Southampton, England in 1829. He came from a Jersey family and his mother was returning to the island for his birth when he arrived prematurely. He lived in Jersey until he entered Sass's Drawing School at the early age of nine. Two years later he entered the Royal Academy Schools, where he stayed for six years. He was a child-prodigy of such exceptional promise to be admitted to the Royal Academy Schools at the age of eleven. Ruskin records an anecdote of his youthful talent which suggests that he could draw with complete adult assurance at the age of seven. Unlike most other aspiring painters he was given every encouragement in the pursuit of his chosen career, his parents even moving from their home in Jersey to allow him to study in London. His amazing facility of hand and eye, coupled with the most thorough and vigorous training available, allowed him to accomplish astonishing feats of technical proficieney. He maintained a consistently high degree of accurate representation, for which he was accorded the unstinted admiration of the public.
Hunt and Rossetti
At the Royal Academy he met the painters Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The three young students were disappointed with their teaching and the prevailing High Victorian style. They believed that the idealistic manner of painters such as Frederic Leighton had deprived art of a true spirit. With others they founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. The name of the movement refers to their artistic influences coming from art made before the Renaissance artist Raphael (1483-1520) - medieval art.
Millais marked the establishment of the movement by including the initials PRB on the bench where Lorenzo and Isabella are seated in his masterpiece from that era, Lorenzo and Isabella. The movement only lasted a few years, despite the fact that the founding members continued to work in a similar manner.
John Ruskin
Millais met John Ruskin, the British art critic who supported the cause of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1851. The two men spent some time in Scotland in 1853 where Millais became close to Ruskin’s wife Effie Gray, whom he later married. Millais was greatly influenced by the teaching of Ruskin and his truth to nature dogma. Ruskin praised Millais’s work comparing him with the other important British painter Turner. However Ruskin and Millais’s friendship broke up when the painter devoted himself to painting portraits of famous people (around 1880), an art form that Ruskin considered a sell-out of Millais’s talents.
Millais was awarded a baronetcy and enjoyed, at the height of his success, an income of £30,000 per year. Ironically all this adulation was accorded to Millais' later works, when the demands of his growing family, and probably also of his own temperament, had led him to abandon Pre-Raphaelitism in favour of portrait painting (he became one of the most successful English portrait painters of the age) and of popular historical and genre subjects.
Millais painted a famous portrait of Lillie Langtry, the Jersey-born actress. It is said that they spoke to each other in Jerriais during the sitting.
Millais was elected a Royal Acedemician in 1863 and a President of the Royal Academy in 1896 when already ill with cancer. When he died he was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral next to Frederic Leighton.
Family tree
Links
- John Everett Millais and Jersey, a 2011 Annual Bulletin of La Société Jersiaise article
We previously showed seven links to external sites with further information about Millais and his work. Unfortunately all are now inactive.
Millais photographs
-
A self portrait -
Millais in his studio -
Millais with family and friends, from his own album -
Millais with the Gray family in 1885 -
Millais, his wife and children in 1865 -
Millais with John Bright in 1879 -
-
-
-
-
Gallery of Millais works
Click on image to see larger picture
Millais painting sold
-
A Millais drawing of Christmas at the Lemprieres -
An illustrated letter by Millais to his friends the Lemprieres -
Millais' friends, the Lempriere family -
Esther -
North-west Passage -
Sir Isumbras at the Ford -
Isabella and Laurenzo -
Mrs Currie -
James Wyatt and his granddaughter Mary -
The Leaven -
Mariana -
Cherry Ripe -
My First Sermon -
The Black Brunswicker -
The Marriage Feast -
Mariana (book illustration) -
A Souvenir of Velasquez -
Huguenot on St Bartholomew's Day -
Waiting -
The Sower -
Self Portrait -
Miss Currie -
Apple Blossoms -
The Bridesmaid
-
The Lost Piece of Silver -
A Beauty -
My Second Sermon -
The Return of the Dove to the Ark -
Ruling Passion -
Twins (Grace and Kate Hoare) -
The Pearl of Great Price -
Spring (detail) -
Master Currie -
Spring (detail) -
Archibald Primrose -
The Good Shepherd -
Chill October -
Cymon and Iphigenia -
Dew-drenched Furze -
Effie Millais
-
Effie (more impressionistic) -
John Ruskin -
The Wicked Husbandman -
Effie Deans -
Hearts are Trumps -
Leisure Hours -
Sophie Grey -
Lorenzo and Isabella (detail) -
Louise Jopling -
The Unmerciful Servant -
Annie Miller -
Cinderella -
Jephthah -
The Order of Release -
Benjamin Disraeli -
W E Gladstone
-
The Hidden Treasure -
Alfred Lord Tennyson -
Thomas Carlyle -
Henry Irving -
George Grey Millais -
The Ransom -
Ferdinand Lured by Ariel -
Autumn Leaves -
The Prodigal Son -
Bubbles -
Christ in the House of his Parents -
Ophelia -
Mrs Bischoffsheim -
Somnambulist -
Woodsman's Daughter -
The Blind Girl -
View near Hampstead -
The Little Speedwell's Darling Blue -
The Yeoman of the Guard -
Marchioness of Huntly -
Mary Chamberlain -
Message from the Sea -
Ophelia (detail) -
Christmas Eve -
Clarissa -
Saint Stephen -
Greenwich Pensioners at Nelson's Tomb -
Lear and Cordelia
-
Merry -
Pippa -
A Disciple -
Gracia Lees -
Sleeping -
Waking -
The Hon John Nevile Manners -
Saint Stephen -
Yes -
The New Ride, Kensington Gardens -
Miss Evelyn Tennant -
Peace Concluded -
Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru -
Mrs James Wyatt and Sarah -
The Return of the Dove to the Ark -
The Artist Attending the Mourning of a Young Girl -
Miss Ann Ryan -
Ruling Passion -
St Bartholomew's Day -
Sweet Emma Morland -
Sweetest Eyes Were Ever Seen -
The Boyhood of Raleigh -
The Eve of St Agnes -
The Knight Errant -
The Martyr of the Solway -
The Nest -
Scotch Firs 'The Silence that is in the Lonely Woods' -
The Rescue
-
The Proscribed Royalist -
The Sound of Many Waters -
The Princes in the Tower -
Trust Me -
Vanessa -
Lalla Rookh -
The Farmer's Daughter -
Serjeant Ralph Thomas -
A Maid Offering a Basket of Fruit to a Cavalier -
Hampstead Landscape -
John Ruskin -
Effie Grey -
Ducklings (detail) -
Early Days -
For the Squire -
Winter Fuel (detail) -
Beatrix Caird -
L'Enfant du Regiment -
Princess Elizabeth in Prison -
Charles I and his Son in the Studio of Van Dyck -
Death of Romeo and Juliet -
The Vale of Rest -
An Idyll -
A Winter's Tale -
Leisure Hours -
I am Never Merry when I hear Sweet Musik -
Portia (Kate Dolan) -
Horses at Dinan
File:Millais122.jpg|The Head of the Virgin (aged 8) File:Millais123.jpg|Knight on Horseback (aged 9) File:Millais124.jpg|The Rejection of Cain's Sacrifice File:Millais125.jpg|Elgiva seized by Order of Odo Archbishop of Canterbury - line sketch File:Millais126.jpg|Elgiva seized by Order of Odo Archbishop of Canterbury - Oil sketch File:Millais127.jpg|Sketches of armour - study for Henry VIII File:Millais167.jpg|The Disentombment of Queen Matilda File:Millais128.jpg|The Gypsy File:Millais129.jpg|Lovers by a Rosebush File:Millais130.jpg|Study for old woman File:Millais131.jpg|The Yeoman of the Guard File:Millais132.jpg|Mary Endicott File:Millais133.jpg|Forbidden Fruit (etching) File:Millais134.jpg|The Baby Horse File:Millais135.jpg|Going to the Park File:Millais136.jpg|O the Lark is Singing in the Sky File:Millais137.jpg|Farmer Chell's Kitchen File:Millais138.jpg|Sister Anna's Probation File:Millais139.jpg|A Wife: Face in both Hands she Knelt on the Carpet File:Millais140.jpg|The Seamstress
File:Millais142.jpg|Cardinal John Henry Newman File:Millais143.jpg|Victory O Lord File:Millais168.jpg|A Baron Numbering his Vassals File:Millais144.jpg|Four Children of the Wyatt Family File:Millais145.jpg|Accepted File:Millais146.jpg|Retribution File:Millais147.jpg|Nina Lehmann File:Millais170.jpg|The Good Samaritan File:Millais107.jpg|A Spanish Gentleman File:Millais148.jpg|Flowing to the River File:Millais149.jpg|Flowing to the Sea File:Millais150.jpg|Winter Fuel File:Millais151.jpg|Fringe of the Moor File:Millais152.jpg|The Crown of Love File:Millais171.jpg|The Wise Virgins File:Millais153.jpg|Caller Herrin File:Millais154.jpg|The Mistletoe Gatherer File:Millais155.jpg|Glen Birnam File:Millais156.jpg|Blow, Blow thou Winter Wind File:Millais157.jpg|Speak, Speak! File:Millais.jpg|A portrait of Millais File:Alice Millais 1874.jpg|Alice File:Millais169.jpg|Kirk File:JEP15MillaisLucyStern.jpg|Millais portrait of Lucy Stern File:GM20MissMcBryde'sBullRaoulMillais.jpg|Miss McBryde's bull Raoul
