John Millais Painter Part I

John Everett Millais is a very interesting painter, who pioneered the Pre Raphaelite style...  He was later criticised for “selling out” and wanting just to make money with his paintings but he was one of the best painters of that style of work.  He was born in Southampton in 1829, but his family were from Jersey in the Channel Islands and he was reared mostly there.  He loved his native island.  His Mother, who was very interested in art and music, noted his talent at an early age and encouraged it.  She was a very forceful determined woman.  The family was not very rich but comfortable.. His father lived on a private income and described himself as a gentleman.  (So Millais was not as poor as some of the other Pre Raphaelites when starting off).   Mrs Millais moved them to London so that he could have training in painting... and he became a pupil of the Royal Academy at the very early age of 11.  He was always grateful to her for her support…

The family lived in the “artistic” part of London, Bloomsbury, in Gower Street. At the Royal Academy he met other young painters who were rebelling against the staid training and conventionality of the place.  In 1848 Millais,  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Holman Hunt began to formulate ideas for a new style of art and formed the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood.  They wanted to back to the simplicities of painting before Raphael….

They took themes from contemporary and other literature rather than the Greek and Roman Classics... and from British and European history and also from modern life. They rejected the idealistic traditions of the Academy, the use of a lot of "brown" in the colouring and the big heavy looking pictures.  They  tried to make their paintings as realistic as possible.   Millais had a great appreciation of natural beauty, and he also tried to ensure that his work was scientifically accurate.  The Pre Raphaelites often painted on subjects from Shakespeare...such as Ophelia’s drowning.  There were also paintings from Tennyson... and later on Millais worked as an illustrator of Victorian novels, including drawing the characters of Antony Trollope.