John Everett Millais (1829-1896)
Millais was a painter and illustrator.
A child prodigy, Millais, at the age of nine, was sent to the Sass’s Art School where he won a silver medal at the Society of Arts. He was the youngest ever student to win a silver medal for drawing from an antique. He won a gold medal for his painting The Tribe of Benjamin Seizing the Daughters of Shiloh.
Millais was one of the seven founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The first avant-garde group in the history of British art. The membership sought to return to the abundant details, intense colors, and compositions of Quattrocento Italian art (1400-1499).
In 1848, he exhibited his first Pre-Raphaelite painting, Isabella, which he exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts. Among Millais’s greatest achievements was his painting The Blind Girl (1850). It was regarded as a tour de force of Victorian sentiment and technical facility. Millais’s most famous work is Ophelia. (1851).
In 1885, Queen Victoria created him a baronet, of Palace Gate, in the parish of St. Mary Abbot, Kensington, in the county of Middlesex, and of Saint Ouen, in the island of Jersey. He was the first artist to be honored with a hereditary title.
