John Everett Millais

Pre-Raphaelite cofounder John Everett Millais (1829-1896) became the most commercially successful British artist of his era after beginning as a revolutionary. A child prodigy who entered the Royal Academy Schools at 11, he helped establish the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with Rossetti and William Holman Hunt. Their radical commitment to "truth to nature" through painstaking detail initially provoked hostility.

Ophelia (1851-52), showing Shakespeare's drowned heroine floating downstream surrounded by precisely rendered flora, became one of Pre-Raphaelitism's defining images. Elizabeth Siddal posed for months in a bathtub to achieve the effect. Christ in the House of His Parents (1849-50) outraged critics, including Dickens, for its unflinching realism in depicting the Holy Family as working-class carpenters. By the 1860s, Millais had moved toward a broader, more commercial style that brought wealth and a baronetcy. He became President of the Royal Academy shortly before his death. Ophelia hangs at Tate Britain, which holds the most comprehensive collection of his work.