Room 1: Pre-Raphaelitism

Millais was born in Southampton, but spent much of his youth on Jersey. The family moved to London in 1838 to encourage his great talent in drawing. In 1840, aged eleven, he entered the Royal Academy of Art schools, still their youngest ever student. Here he produced fine academic studies and won a number of prizes.

In 1848 Millais’s art underwent a dramatic transformation when he established the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with a group of six other rebellious young artists including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt. This movement was formed in a spirit of opposition to the operatic illusionism that underpinned British academic painting and which characterises Millais’s own Pizarro of 1846. Pre-Raphaelite works, by contrast, revived medieval and early-Renaissance art and featured a deliberate naivety in composition and a psychological intensity which insisted on the quirks and specifics of human physiognomy.

Paintings like Isabella and Christ in the House of his Parents were widely perceived as perverse and even repulsive, making Millais the enfant terrible of the movement. However, the technical brilliance with which he rendered surface detail also marked him as the most precociously skilful artist of the group and his Pre-Raphaelite pictures, no matter how radical, were always accepted into the Academy exhibitions.

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John Everett Millais
Self-Portrait 1847
Oil on millboard
Lent by National Museums Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery. Presented by Miss Eleanor Prior 1977

Millais painted himself working at his easel when he was around eighteen-years-old and still a student at the Royal Academy. He is styled as a young professional in his distinctive black velvet painting coat. By this year he had already gained a reputation as a prize winner in competitions organised by the Society of Arts and, fittingly for an artist with high aspirations, was also tackling ambitious themes from the Bible, literature and history.

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John Everett Millais
Sketches of Arms and Armour from the time of Elizabeth I 1844
Pen and sepia ink on paper
Lent by Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery

This is one of a group of five studies of armour made at the Tower of London which may have been intended for a book. Millais showed a strong interest in scenes of combat in his youth. His understanding of the mechanics and function of weapons can be seen in the ambitious painting Pizarro (below).

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John Everett Millais
Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru 1846
Oil on canvas
Lent by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Millais was only sixteen when the Royal Academy accepted this composition for exhibition. It shows the conquistador Francisco Pizarro capturing, in 1532, Atahuallpa, the last Inca emperor, at Cajamarca in the Peruvian highlands, an event accompanied by the slaughter of around seven thousand Inca by Spanish forces. The pyramidal composition, Baroque diagonals and lighting, and groups of huddled women and children derive from religious pictures of the Renaissance and later neoclassical and Romantic history paintings.

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John Everett Millais
The Death of Romeo and Juliet 1848
Pen and black ink on paper
Lent by Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery

An inscription from the picture’s back described this scene: ‘The painting represents an incident in Millais’s own life when he was sent for by people unknown to him, but who knew him to be a young artist, to draw a portrait of a girl in her coffin before her burial. The scene moved him so much that when he got home he made this sketch showing himself being asked to draw the girl’s portrait.’

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John Everett Millais
The Artist Attending the Mourning of a Young Girl
about 1847
Oil on board
Tate. Purchased 1996
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An inscription from the picture’s back described this scene: ‘The painting represents an incident in Millais’s own life when he was sent for by people unknown to him, but who knew him to be a young artist, to draw a portrait of a girl in her coffin before her burial. The scene moved him so much that when he got home he made this sketch showing himself being asked to draw the girl’s portrait.’

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John Everett Millais
Isabella 1848–9
Oil on canvas
© National Museums Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery

This was the first painting Millais exhibited after the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, causing a stir at the Royal Academy in 1849. Based on Keats’s Isabella; or the Pot of Basil (1818), it explores the love between Lorenzo and Isabella, and her brothers’ determination to destroy the relationship. Using friends as models, Millais establishes a tension between the modern individuality of each sitter and their imagined role, reinforcing the psychological complexity of the narrative.

“ Fair Isabel, poor simple Isabel! Lorenzo, a young palmer in Love’s eye! They could not in the self-same mansion dwell Without some stir of heart, some malady; They could not sit at meals but feel how well It soothed each to be the other by; They could not, sure, beneath the same roof sleep But to each other dream, and nightly weep. ”
Extract from Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil, John Keats, 1818

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John Everett Millais
Study for ‘Isabella’: Isabella and her brother with caricature 1848
Pencil on paper
Lent by Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. Purchased by subscribers, 1906

This was the first painting Millais exhibited after the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, causing a stir at the Royal Academy in 1849. Based on Keats’s Isabella; or the Pot of Basil (1818), it explores the love between Lorenzo and Isabella, and her brothers’ determination to destroy the relationship. Using friends as models, Millais establishes a tension between the modern individuality of each sitter and their imagined role, reinforcing the psychological complexity of the narrative.

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John Everett Millais
Christ in the House of His Parents
(The Carpenter’s Shop)
1849-50
Oil on canvas
Tate. Purchased with assistance from
The Art Fund and various subscribers, 1921
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This was probably the most notorious image produced by a member of the Brotherhood. Jesus has pierced his hand on a nail and is attended to by His father and mother, while the young John the Baptist brings water and St Anne looks on. The picture was considered offensive both because of its Roman Catholic liturgical references and for appearing too realistic. Most shocking was the haggard expression of the Virgin.

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John Everett Millais
The Eve of St Agnes 1850
Oil on millboard
The Maas Gallery, London

Millais made this sketch with the idea of following Isabella with another subject from Keats. The painting illustrates Keats’s poem The Eve of St Agnes which describes Madeline disrobing, her dress ‘rustling to her knees... like a mermaid in sea-weed’, unaware that her lover Porphyro is observing her. In 1862 Millais took up the same scene again on a far larger scale and in an Aestheticist style (see Room 3).

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John Everett Millais
Mariana 1850-1
Oil on wood (mahogany)
Tate. Accepted by HM Government in lieu of tax and allocated to the Tate Gallery 1999
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The inspiration for this painting came from Tennyson’s poem Mariana (1830), itself derived from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Mariana has been rejected by her fiancé Angelo and leads a solitary life in a moated grange. Millais shows her torn between spiritual seclusion and feelings of physical yearning. The large silver vessel on the altar appears again in The Bridesmaid and the drawing St Agnes’ Eve in this room, both of which also depict erotic longing.

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John Everett Millais
The Return of the Dove to the Ark 1851
Oil on canvas
Lent by The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Bequeathed by Mrs Thomas Combe, 1893

In this imaginary interpretation of Genesis the wives of Noah’s sons tend the dove that was released from the ark and which returned, exhausted and ruffled, with an olive-branch revealing the flood’s recession. Such figures against a dark background became a frequent motif in Millais’s works, saving him time in painting, and bringing forward details such as the astounding verisimilitude in the hay on the floor. Millais also designed the frame with its related motifs.

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John Everett Millais
Portrait of a Gentleman and his Grandchild (James Wyatt and his Granddaughter, Mary Wyatt) 1849
Oil on wood
Lent by The Lord Lloyd Webber

This is one of several portraits commissioned from Millais by his important early patron, James Wyatt (1774–1853), a frame-maker, print seller and art dealer who lived above his shop at 115 High Street, Oxford. He sits stiff-legged, in a wing chair, with four-year-old Mary affectionately leaning on him. It is typical of the naturalistic aims of early Pre-Raphaelite portraiture, lacking the bombast and idealism associated with traditional portraits.

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John Everett Millais
Mrs James Wyatt Jr and her Daughter Sarah 1850
Oil on mahogany
Tate. Purchased 1984
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This is a portrait of James Wyatt’s daughter-in-law Eliza, with his granddaughter, one-year-old Sarah. It was commissioned as a pendant to his own portrait with Sarah’s sister, seen on this wall. The prints after Raphael’s Madonna della Sedia, Leonardo’s Last Supper and Raphael’s Alba Madonna on the back wall serve to assert the real presence and individuality of the modern mother and child group in the foreground.

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John Everett Millais
Thomas Combe 1850
Oil on panel
Lent by The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Bequeathed by Mrs Thomas Combe, 1893

Thomas Combe (1797–1872) was Printer to the University of Oxford, a devout member of the Anglican High Church, and one of Millais’s more ardent early patrons. Millais frequently stayed with him and his wife Martha while working in Oxford. Combe owned The Return of the Dove to the Ark, and Millais encouraged his purchase of works by other members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. The arms in the corner were from Elizabethan Combe families.

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John Everett Millais
Ophelia 1851-2
Oil on canvas
Tate. Presented by Sir Henry Tate 1894
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Ophelia marks a transition in Millais’s style to a more poetic conception of nature and female beauty, as well as a life-long interest in human frailty and mortality. Ophelia, posed by Rossetti’s eventual wife Elizabeth Siddal, sinks to her muddy death in an image of pathos and sentiment. Its intense natural detail, painted on the banks of the Hogsmill near Ewell, Surrey, heightens Ophelia’s distress, and represents the beauty she leaves behind.

Find out more in Millais' Ophelia work in focus

Room 2