Millais

Millais, Sir John Everett, R.A. (b. 1829), was born at Southampton and brought up in Jersey, to which his family belonged. He became a student at the Royal Academy at the age of eleven, and in 1846 exhibited his first picture Pizarro seizing the Inca of Peru. He now became convinced of the conventionality and unreality of contemporary art - a belief in which he was confirmed by a study of Giotto, Ghiberti, and other early Italian painters and sculptors - and he joined with Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and others in founding the "Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood," whose aim it was to give a faithful representation of nature. To this period belong Isabella (1849), The Carpenter's Shop (1850), The Huguenot and Ophelia (1852), Autumn Leaves (1856), and The Vale of Rest (1860). The North-West Passage (1874) is one of the finest examples of his later methods. His landscapes, such as Chill October (1871) and The Fringe of the Moor (1874), for the most part depict the wilder aspects of the scenery of Scotland. Among his best portraits are those of Mr. Bright (1880), Cardinal Newman (1882), and Lord Salisbury (1883). He was made an A.R.A. in 1853, and R.A. in 1863, and a baronet in 1885.