Sir John Everett MILLAIS
1829–1896, England
Also known as: M
Millais was born in Southampton in 1829, the son of John William and Emily Mary Millais. His father came from a well-known Jersey family, and his mother nee Evamy came from a prosperous family of Southampton saddlers. Emily Millais had been married previously to one Enoch Hodgkinson, by whom she had two sons. By her marriage to John William Millais she had, as well as John Everett a daughter, and another son William Henry, who was the close companion of his famous younger brother throughout his life, and a well-known painter of watercolours The family initially moved back to Jersey and then to London in 1838, specifically to further the artistic education of their precocious son. Armed with a letter of introduction they visited Sir Martin Archer Shee, the President of the Royal Academy. As a result of this meeting Millais became the youngest ever pupil at the Royal Academy Schools in the summer of 1840. He was known at the RA Schools as "The Child," and his talent caused considerable jealousy amongst fellow students. Millais was very thin, extremely agile, and physically brave, and was well-able to cope with the bullying he encountered at this time. At the RA Schools he met William Holman Hunt, who became a lifelong friend, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. From the meeting of these three youthful idealists the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was born.
Millais was by far the most naturally gifted of the founders of the PRB. His early paintings in the PR style were amazingly accomplished for such a young artist. He produced pictures which were minutely observed, with a painstaking attention to detail, which meant that painting them was a slow and laborious process. He would typically paint landscape backgrounds in the summer, and add figures in the foreground in his studio during the winter. Each of his pictures was also the result of a large number of detailed preparatory drawings. He went to considerable trouble and expense, even as an impecunious young artist to find the right props, a notable example of this being the dress worn by Ophelia, for which he paid four pounds a considerable sum at that time...
Source: http://www.artrenewal.org/