Artist John Everett Millais ALS

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Four page autographed letter dated 1885 and signed by John Everett Millais . Paper and signature are in good condition, a little toning and foxing. Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet , PRA ( June 8 , 1829 - August 13 , 1896 ) was a British painter and illustrator who was one of founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood . Life and work Millais (pronounced Mih-lay) was born in Southampton in 1829, of a prominent Jersey -based family. His prodigious artistic talent won him a place at the Royal Academy schools at the unprecedented age of eleven. While t, he met William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti with whom he formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in September 1848 in his family home on Gower Street, off Bedford Square. Pre-Raphaelite works Millais' Christ In The House Of His Parents (1850) was highly controversial because of its realistic portrayal of a working class Holy Family labouring in a messy carpentry workshop. Later works were also controversial, though less so. Millais achieved popular success with A Huguenot (1852), which depicts a young couple about to be separated because of religious conflicts. He repeated this theme in many later works. All these early works were painted with great attention to detail, often concentrating on the beauty and complexity of the natural world. In paintings such as Ophelia (1 852) Millais created dense and elaborate pictorial surfaces based on the integration of naturalistic elements. This approach has been described as a kind of "pictorial eco-system".This style was promoted by the critic John Ruskin , who had defended the Pre-Raphaelites against their critics. Millais' friendship with Ruskin introduced him to Ruskin's wife Effie . Soon after they met she modelled for his painting The Order of Release . As Millais painted Effie they fell in love. Despite having been married to Ruskin for several years, Effie was still a virgin. Her parents realized something was wrong and she filed for an annulment . In 1856, after her marriage to Ruskin was annulled, Effie and John Millais married. He and Effie eventually had eight children. Later works After his marriage, Millais began to paint in a broader style, which was condemned by Ruskin as "a catastrophe". It has been argued that this change of style resulted from Millais's need to increase his output to support his growing family. Unsympathetic critics such as William Morris accused him of "selling out" to achieve popularity and wealth. His admirers, in contrast, pointed to the artist's connections with Whistler and Albert Moore , and influence on John Singer Sargent . Millais himself argued that as he grew more confident as an artist, he could paint with greater boldness. In his article "Thoughts on our art of Today" (1888) he recommended Velázquez and Rembrandt as models for artists to follow. Paintings such as The Eve of St. Agnes and The Somnambulist clearly show an ongoing dialogue between the artist and Whistler, whose work Millais strongly supported. Other paintings of the late 1850s and 1860s can be interpreted as anticipating aspects of the Aesthetic Movement . Many deploy broad blocks of harmoniously arranged colour and are symbolic rather than narratival. Later works, from the 1870s onwards demonstrate Millais's reverence for old masters such as Joshua Reynolds and Velázquez. These participate in an 18th century revival in British art. Notable among these are The North West Passage (1874) and the Boyhood of Raleigh (1871). Such paintings indicate Millais's interest in subjects connected to Britain's expanding empire and world-wide explorations. His last project was to be a painting depicting a white hunter lying dead in the African veldt , his body contemplated by two indifferent Africans. This fascination with wild and bleak locations is also evident in his many landscape paintings of this period, which usually depict difficult or dangerous terrain. The first of these, Chill October (1870) was painted in Perth , near his wife's family home. Many others were painted ... read more

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