Sir John Everett Millais

Sir John Everett Millais was an English painter born in Southampton and educated in art at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. At the age of 17 he exhibited at the academy his Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru (1846, Victoria and Albert Museum, London), then considered one of the best history paintings shown that year. In 1848 he and two other English painters, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt, formed a brotherhood of artists known as the Pre-Raphaelites. Millais's first Pre-Raphaelite painting, the scene Lorenzo and Isabella (1849, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), recalls the manner of the early Flemish and Italian masters. Beginning in the early 1870s, he created many portraits of British personalities, famous in his time. He was a careful artist who paid strict attention to detail, unusual composition, and clarity. In much of his later work he succumbed to the Victorian taste for sentiment and anecdotal art.