John Everett Millais

1829 – 1896

English painter. He was in the Royal Academy Schools in 1840 - an infant prodigy. In 1848, he, Hunt and Rossetti founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; his Christ in the House of His Parents (1850, Tate Gallery, London) was savagely attacked by Charles Dickens, but Ruskin defended him and the Brotherhood generally. In 1853 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy. In 1855 he married Ruskin's former wife, and his friendship with Ruskin was broken off. Millais developed into a fashionable and technically brilliant academic painter of portraits, costume history and genre pieces, forsaking his original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood theories, and went on to become Royal Academician (1863), and President in 1896, just before his death. He was made a baronet in 1885.

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