Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896), an English painter of great technical brilliance, was a founder member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

John Everett Millais was born in Southampton. His parents recognized his precocious talent and moved to London when John was 9. That year he won the Silver Medal for drawing from the Royal Society of Arts. At the age of 11 he entered the Royal Academy Schools and won a succession of prizes, including the Gold Medal in 1847.

At this time Millais's close friend William Holman Hunt was formulating new ideas under the influence of John Keats's poetry and John Ruskin's Modern Painters. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Millais, and Hunt founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. Inspired by this new approach, Millais painted Lorenzo and Isabella (1849), from Keats's Isabella, and Christ in the House of His Parents (1850). The latter painting was exhibited in the academy in 1850; Charles Dickens said it showed "the...