John Everett Millais

John Everett Millais was a British painter who co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood at nineteen and ended as President of the Royal Academy, a trajectory his early allies regarded as a betrayal. Born in Southampton in 1829 and raised in Jersey, he was a prodigy: he entered the Royal Academy Schools at eleven, the youngest ever admitted, and won its medals as a teenager. In 1848 he founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Their programme rejected the idealising conventions taught in academies since Raphael in favour of intense colour, sharp detail across the whole picture plane, and painting directly from nature. Christ in the House of His Parents in 1850, which showed the Holy Family as actual carpenters in an actual workshop, was attacked by Charles Dickens as blasphemous for its ordinariness. Ophelia, painted in 1851-52, is his best-known work. He painted the river bank at Ewell over five months, then had Elizabeth Siddal lie in a bath of water heated by lamps beneath; the lamps went out, and she caught a serious chill. John Ruskin defended the Brotherhood in print. Millais then fell in love with Ruskin's wife Effie Gray while painting the critic's portrait in Scotland in 1853; her marriage was annulled for non-consummation in 1854 and she married Millais the following year, a scandal that fascinated Victorian society. His later work loosened into broad brushwork and sentimental subjects — Bubbles of 1886 was bought by Pears to advertise soap. He became a baronet in 1885 and President of the Royal Academy in 1896, dying months later.

• Lived: 1829 CE – 1896 CE
• Nationality: English
• Roles: painter