Sir John Everett Millais

Born in 1829 on the Channel island of Jersey, John Everett Millais showed an astonishing artistic gift from the moment he began sketching Breton landscapes as a child. By age nine, his precocious drawings impressed the president of the Royal Academy, prompting his enrollment at Henry Sass’s drawing school and a silver medal from the Society of Arts. He entered the Royal Academy Schools at eleven, the youngest ever, and spent the next six years racking up prizes, including a gold medal for a dramatic historical canvas.

Unsatisfied with academic conventions, Millais joined forces with fellow students Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt in 1848, inspired by the raw honesty of early Italian masters. Their shared rebellion gave birth to the Pre‑Raphaelite Brotherhood, a brief but seismic movement that championed vivid detail, moral seriousness, and a return to nature. The biography follows Millais as he wrestles with his own convictions, setting the stage for the revolutionary art that would reshape Victorian Britain.