Millais broadened his style a good deal after his
marriage. He did state that he could not
spend long periods of time on each detail of each painting... the implication being that he had a family to
provide for. Effie was fond of social
life and Millais also enjoyed it, though there were some who did not accept
them socially because of her first marriage. Some of the Pre Raphaelites
criticised him for abandoning his original style and Morris accused him of
“selling out”… He still painted
historical subjects but not in the Pre Raphaelite way… He also painted society women and portraits
were a large part of his output. He
notoriously sold one of his paintings “Bubbles” as an advertisement for
soap which was considered by many of his artistic friends to be vulgar commercialisation of his art....
He painted landscapes but they
were often bleak and set in the Autumn or winter…
He was honoured by the queen’s making him a baronet... in
the 1880s… He and Effie lived in Kensington... which was not really the
aristocratic part of London, at that time... However it was a pleasant area and became a home to many artists who
were comfortably off. However the queen would not receive Effie...because she felt that as queen she could not receive a woman who had had a controversial ending to her first marriage.
It was not
until Millais was dying of throat cancer that he asked her to receive his wife
and she did so…
His Marriage to Effie was a happy one and produced a large
family... and they enjoyed their life
together… Ruskin however had a stressful life... He fell in love with a young
girl Rose La Touche...and asked her to marry him when she was 18. She was drawn
to him but her family were reluctant to let her marry a man whose first
marriage had been annulled because of his “incurable impotence”. Effie and her family were upset at this development, in the later 1860s...and feared that if
Ruskin remarried and had a normal marital relationship, it might mean that her
new marriage to Millais would be invalid. But the marriage did not take place
and Ruskin developed mental problems.
John Millais died in August 1896 and Effie died a year
later. He left a large body of work…..
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