MILLAIS, Sir John Everett

Featured Paintings in Detail

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MILLAIS, Sir John EverettOphelia1851-52Oil on canvas, 76 x 112 cmTate Gallery, London

MILLAIS, Sir John EverettOphelia (detail)1851-52Oil on canvas, 76 x 112 cmTate Gallery, London

MILLAIS, Sir John EverettOphelia (detail)1851-52Oil on canvas, 76 x 112 cmTate Gallery, London

MILLAIS, Sir John EverettOphelia (detail)1851-52Oil on canvas, 76 x 112 cmTate Gallery, London

MILLAIS, Sir John EverettOphelia (detail)1851-52Oil on canvas, 76 x 112 cmTate Gallery, London

MILLAIS, Sir John EverettOphelia (detail)1851-52Oil on canvas, 76 x 112 cmTate Gallery, London

MILLAIS, Sir John EverettMariana1851Oil on mahogany wood, 59.7 x 49.5 cm Tate Britain, London

MILLAIS, Sir John EverettMariana (detail)1851Oil on mahogany wood, 59.7 x 49.5 cm Tate Britain, London

MILLAIS, Sir John EverettMariana (detail)1851Oil on mahogany wood, 59.7 x 49.5 cm Tate Britain, London

MILLAIS, Sir John EverettMariana (detail)1851Oil on mahogany wood, 59.7 x 49.5 cm Tate Britain, London

MILLAIS, Sir John EverettThe Bridesmaid1851Oil on canvas, 27.9 x 20.3 cm Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

MILLAIS, Sir John EverettThe Bridesmaid (detail)1851Oil on canvas, 27.9 x 20.3 cm Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

MILLAIS, Sir John EverettThe Bridesmaid (detail)1851Oil on canvas, 27.9 x 20.3 cm Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

MILLAIS, Sir John EverettThe Bridesmaid (detail)1851Oil on canvas, 27.9 x 20.3 cm Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

MILLAIS, Sir John EverettA Souvenir Of Velazquez1868 Oil on canvas, 1027 X 824 mmRoyal Academy of Arts, London

MILLAIS, Sir John EverettA Souvenir Of Velazquez (detail)1868 Oil on canvas, 1027 X 824 mmRoyal Academy of Arts, London

MILLAIS, Sir John EverettA Souvenir Of Velazquez (detail)1868 Oil on canvas, 1027 X 824 mmRoyal Academy of Arts, London

MILLAIS, Sir John Everett , Featured Paintings in Detail (1)

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MILLAIS, Sir John EverettA Souvenir Of Velazquez

In Souvenir of Velázquez, Sir John Everett Millais beautifully balances an almost contradictory sight: the Anglican infanta. Her hair is rendered in the manner of the court contemporary to Velázquez, and the orange in her grasp perhaps references his Seville period of the time. Also, Millais employs the technique made famous by Velázquez:

chiaroscuro, the art of lighting a scene from an angled source as if in theatre.

MILLAIS, Sir John EverettOphelia

Millais painted the landscape for this painting beside a stream while staying with his friend William Holman Hunt on a farm in Surrey in the summer and fall of 1851. The time Millais took over this painting from the life enabled him to represent the flowers he required (some of which were cited by Shakespeare in Hamlet and some of which

were included for their symbolic value), even if they did not all bloom at the same time.

Following a method much used by the Pre-Raphaelites, Millais painted the figure in his London studio during the following winter. There he observed the effect of drowning, again from the life, by having Elizabeth Siddal (the group's favourite model and Rossetti's future wife) pose in a heated bathtub, wearing an old-fashioned dress.

MILLAIS, Sir John EverettMariana

Tennyson's poem was inspired by the character of Mariana in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. Rejected by her fiancé, Angelo, after her dowry was lost in a shipwreck, she leads a lonely existence in a moated grange. She is still in love with Angelo - now Deputy to the Duke of Vienna - and longs to be reunited with him.

In the picture the autumn leaves scattered on the ground mark the passage of time. Mariana has been working at some embroidery and pauses to stretch her back. Her longing for Angelo is suggested by her pose and the needle thrust fiercely into her embroidery.

The stained-glass windows in front of her show the Annunciation, contrasting the Virgin's fulfilment with Mariana's frustration and longing. Millais copied the scene from the window of the Chapel of Merton College, Oxford. However, the heraldic design appears to have been his own invention.

The motto 'In coelo quies' means 'In Heaven there is rest' and clearly refers to Mariana's desire to be dead. The snowdrop symbolises 'consolation' and is also the birthday flower for 20 January, St Agnes' Eve, when young girls put herbs in their shoes and pray to St Agnes to send them a vision of their future husband.

The mouse in the right foreground is Tennyson's mouse that 'Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek'd, | Or from the crevice peer'd about'The miniature altar in the background, decorated with a small triptych, and a silver casket, in which Mariana prays desperately to the Virgin Mary.

MILLAIS, Sir John EverettThe Bridesmaid

The Bridesmaid was painted in 1851, during John Everett Millais’s involvement in the rebel Pre-Raphaelite movement, and – typically for an artist at the age of 21 – he has love, sex and marriage on his mind. The near-symmetrical composition presents an unwed and apparently chaste girl of age with a face, framed by her teaming hair, looking above and beyond the

viewer in a state of deep, concerned longing. She is engaged in a folk tradition of passing a piece of wedding cake through a ring nine times, an act that would be rewarded with the vision of her true love.The-Bridesmaid-full

The orange blossom she wears on what appears an oriental print dress expresses, according to similar but distinct interpretations, either her virginity or her commitment to marriage and fidelity. The most prominent item in front of her is the silver vessel that breaks the symmetry of her hair and brings what one critic describes as a “phallic authority” to the painting. While it

appears elsewhere in Millais’s work as an incense burner, here it is a pointedly upright sugar caster, representing “containment, swelling and sweetness”. Say no more – aside from the footnote that Millais apparently later gave it to his future wife Effie Gray, who was inconveniently wed to his faithful supporter John Ruskin at the time, as something of a promise.

The caster is placed deliberately on white cloth, which recreates the table as something of an altar, allowing the scene to be read as one of prayer. The red bowl is cropped to create a curve that directs the viewer upward to the fixated gaze of the maiden and holds two fruits; an orange and a pomegranate that could represent symbols of free will and fertility. The pomegranate

also has association with Saint Catherine, the mythical bride of Christ, to add a religious overtone that characterised much of the Pre-Raphaelite output.

On top of all that highly-charged symbolism is an ambiguity in the subject itself: the bridesmaid – and whether she is real, reflected or imagined. A revisiting of romantic poetry at the time offers the possibility that this is, in fact, an unmarried girl staring into a mirror or even a conjured image of a man’s longed-for lover. An attention to the brushwork offers the possibility of

glazed reflections in her eyes, lips and skin and across her hair, which has been grown to an almost ludicrous length and prefigures much of the long-locked models in Millais’s later Aesthetic work. Certainly his fascination with how paintings are viewed and precocity could explain such an attempt to deliver a deceptive twist to an otherwise simple subject. But even as

a picture of tentative dreaming for a future fulfilment it remains enchanting.

MILLAIS, Sir John Everett

Sir John Everett Millais was an English painter and precocious artist. Learning to draw at age 4, his parents providing him with private art lessons with a Mr. Bessel. Encouraged by Bessel, the family visited London with an introduction to the President of the Royal Academy and in 1840, at age eleven, John Millais became the youngest

student ever at the Academy. In 1846, he exhibited his Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru at the RA.

Along with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt he was a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and was markedly influenced by them and by John Ruskin. His first Pre-Raphaelite picture Lorenzo and Isabella,

the banquet scene from the poem Isabella, or The Pot of Basil about ill-fated love by English poet Keats, figures in the Academy in 1849, where it was followed in 1850 by Christ in the House of His Parents, Ferdinand Lured by

Ariel which met the full force of the anti-Pre-Raphaelite reaction.

In 1855, he married Euphemia (Effie) Charmers Ruskin, the divorcée of John Ruskin, who bore him 8 children; they appeared later on many of his pictures. Ruskin continued to praise the artist. Preoccupied with his social

standing, Millais later abandoned the Pre-Raphaelite style, broke with John Ruskin, and began to cater to popular tastes. The exquisite Gambler’s Wife and The Boyhood of Raleigh mark the transition of his art into its final phase, displaying brilliant and effective coloring and his effortless power of brushwork. The interest and value of his later

works, largely portraits, lies mainly in their splendid technical qualities. In 1885, at age 56, Millais was made a baronet, and eleven years later became president of the Royal Academy and

was decorated with many foreign orders and awards. He died the same year, and was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral.