John Everett Millais

Founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and, in the 1870s and 1880s, the most popular painter in Britain. A child prodigy, he entered the Royal Academy Schools at the age of eleven and made his debut at the RA's annual exhibition at sixteen. He and his friend and fellow student William Holman Hunt developed radical ideas about the state of British art and formed the "P.R.B.," with other like-minded young artists, in 1848. The group dedicated themselves to treating serious subjects as naturally and truthfully as possible, in meticulous detail, rejecting the conventions of ideal beauty. In the 1860s Millais's style of painting loosened, and the artistic heroes of his later career were to be the painterly Old Masters, especially Frans Hals, Diego de Velasquez, and Joshua Reynolds. In 1885 he was created a baronet, and in the last year of his life he was elected President of the Royal Academy.

[Great British Paintings Label Text]