Millais

Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet PRA (1829 – 1896) was an English painter and illustrator who was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was a child prodigy who, aged eleven, became the youngest student to enter the Royal Academy Schools. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded at his family home in London. Millais became the most famous exponent of the style, his painting Christ in the House of His Parents generating considerable controversy, and painting perhaps the embodiment of the school, Ophelia.

By the mid-1850s Millais was moving away from the Pre-Raphaelite style to develop a new form of realism in his art. 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.

Periods: Realism, Romanticism, Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.