John Everett Millais: A collection of 207 paintings (HD)

John Everett Millais: A collection of 207 paintings (HD)

Description: Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet, (born June 8, 1829, Southampton, Hampshire, Eng.—died Aug. 13, 1896, London) English painter and illustrator, and a founding member of the artistic movement known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In 1838 Millais went to London and at the age of 11 entered the Royal Academy schools. Extremely precocious, he won all the academy prizes. In 1848 Millais joined with two other artists, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, to form the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Brotherhood was founded in opposition to contemporary academic painting, which the group believed was the result of the example set by Raphael and which had dominated the schools and academies since his time. At the next year’s academy, the novelist Charles Dickens led a violent attack on Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents (1850), which many considered blasphemous because of its lack of idealization and seeming irreverence in the use of the mundane.
Millais’s period of greatest artistic achievement came in the 1850s. The Return of the Dove to the Ark (1851) was admired by both the English essayist and critic John Ruskin and the French author Théophile Gautier; and The Order of Release (1853), which included a portrait of his future wife Effie Gray (then unhappily married to Ruskin, whose portrait Millais also painted), was praised by Eugène Delacroix in 1855 and earned for its artist his associateship to the Royal Academy in 1853. In 1856 Millais painted one of his greatest public successes, The Blind Girl—a tour de force of Victorian sentiment and technical facility.