John Everett Milliais
Born – Southampton, England 1829
Died – London, England 1896
John Everett Milliais’s prodigious talent meant that at the age of 11 he was the Royal Academy’s youngest ever student. Together with Holman Hunt and Rossetti, he founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, with its intensity of feeling, brilliant colour and minutely observed detail, closely followed Pre-Raphaelite principles. He painted The Blind Girl near Winchelsea in the summer of 1854, using models to complete the figures. This poignant painting manages to avoid sentimentality in its depiction of a blind girl unable to appreciate the intense beauty of the sky before a storm. The emotional force of the painting is reinforced by the closeness of the relationship between the girl and her younger companion, as well as by the unity of the figures with their natural surroundings. In the late 1850s Millais’s style changed. Declaring that he had a family to support, he moved away from the Pre-Raphaelite principle of expressing serious moral concepts to satisfy a public demand for popular storytelling. Technically brilliant, he developed into a fashionable and prosperous Victorian painter.
Masterpieces:
- Autumn Leaves
- Ophelia
Text: The A-Z of Art, Nicola Hodge and Libby Anson.