John Everett Millais

Millais entered the Royal Academy Schools at eleven, the youngest student in its history. In 1848, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded at his family home on Gower Street, and he became its star: Christ in the House of His Parents stirred fierce controversy in 1849-50, and Ophelia in 1851-52 became the movement's defining image. By the mid-1850s he had begun drifting from Pre-Raphaelite rigor toward a looser realism that made him wealthy and famous - and led former admirers like William Morris to accuse him of selling out, especially after he lent a painting to a soap advertisement. His personal life tangled with his reputation: he married Effie, formerly the wife of critic John Ruskin, whose marriage had been annulled; she became a shrewd promoter of his work. Early twentieth-century critics dismissed his later paintings, but recent decades have repositioned them as part of broader shifts in late Victorian art.