Ophelia (1851–1852)
Tate Britain, London
Hamlet's Ophelia drowning among flowers; Elizabeth Siddal posed in a bath of water
Image: John Everett Millais · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Art
John Everett Millais
1829–1896 · English
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
John Everett Millais was a child prodigy who co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 and painted its most famous image, Ophelia. He later became the most commercially successful painter of the Victorian age, the first artist made a baronet, and briefly President of the Royal Academy.
How to spot them
- ▸Early works: minutely detailed, brightly lit nature and literary subjects from Shakespeare, Keats and Tennyson
- ▸Later works: sentimental, popular scenes of children and history, such as Bubbles and The Boyhood of Raleigh
- ▸Quiz clue: Ophelia floating in a river, Effie Gray, John Ruskin, Pears soap
Key works
Christ in the House of His Parents (1849–1850)
Tate Britain, London
Holy Family as ordinary carpenters; Charles Dickens attacked it savagely
Image: John Everett Millais · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Mariana (1851)
Tate Britain, London
Tennyson's lonely Mariana stretching her back in a deep-blue velvet dress
Image: John Everett Millais · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
The Blind Girl (1856)
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery
A blind musician rests after rain beneath a double rainbow she cannot see
Image: John Everett Millais · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Bubbles (1886)
Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight
His grandson blowing bubbles; famously used in advertisements for Pears soap
Image: John Everett Millais · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
The Boyhood of Raleigh (1870)
Tate Britain, London
Young Walter Raleigh listens to a sailor's tales on the Devon coast
Image: John Everett Millais · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Southampton in 1829 to a family from Jersey.
- •At 11 he became the youngest student ever admitted to the Royal Academy Schools.
- •He co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt.
- •Elizabeth Siddal caught a severe cold posing for Ophelia when the lamps warming her bath went out.
- •He married Effie Gray in 1855 after her marriage to the critic John Ruskin was annulled.
- •In 1885 he became the first artist to be made a baronet.
- •He was elected President of the Royal Academy in 1896, months before his death, and is buried in St Paul's Cathedral.
- •Bubbles was originally titled 'A Child's World'.
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