Sir John Everett Millais

1829 - 1896 • English • Painter • Pre-Raphaelite

"I hope it will not have any bad effects upon her mind.' - Sir John Everett Millais

With fellow students William Holman HUNT and ROSSETTI, Millais was one of the three founders of the PRERAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD. Their first meeting was at his house in London, around the corner from the British Museum, in 1848. He was then 19 years old. Millais worked out the "wet white" technique: transparent colors applied over white paint that was still wet. Others adapted this method to achieve a high, fresh, sunlit look. Millais's painting Christ in the Carpenter's Shop (1849-50), showing Joseph in his workshop with Mary and young Christ, whose cut hand prefigures his Crucifixion, resulted in reviews so ferocious that they are now legendary. Among those incensed was Charles Dickens, who described Millais's Christ as "a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-haired boy" and Mary as "so horrible in her ugliness ... that she would stand out from the rest of the company as a monster in the vilest cabaret in France or the lowest gin-shop in England." Amid the uproar, Queen Victoria had the picture removed from exhibition and brought to her, at which point Millais made the sardonic comment quoted above. Christ in the Carpenter's Shop is painted with meticulous attention to detail. Millais spent time in a carpentry shop to research procedures, tools, and so forth, and one can count the number of curls in a wood shaving or the strands of hair that cross Joseph's balding head. While the artist's own father modeled for Joseph's face, for Joseph's arm Millais studied the arm of a real carpenter to be sure the muscle structure was accurate. He used sheep heads from a butcher for representing the flock outside the door. Such pedestrian, GENRE treatment of a holy subject was partly responsible for the picture's scalding reception, but the existence of the newly revealed secret society of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood also influenced the reaction, inciting fear that they were a subversive group of young renegades. Millais fell in love with RUSKIN's new wife, who had her marriage annulled in order to marry Millais. He went on to enjoy fame and wealth, especially from paintings of children, one of which became famous as an advertisement for Pears soap (Bubbles, 1886). He also painted portraits of prominent figures, including Thomas Carlyle (1877), William Gladstone (1879 and 1885), and Benjamin Disraeli (1881), and large-scale landscapes of the Scottish countryside, such as Chill October (1870). In 1885 he became the first artist to be made a baronet.