John Everett Millais was not only a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood but also a commercially successful and artistically influential modern painter. Phaidon Press and Jason Rosenfeld present for the first time the artist’s entire career showing how the development of his art was at the forefront of contemporary painting throughout his life. 

 

John Everett Millais (1829–1896) was one of the most significant English painters of the nineteenth century, successful and respected during his career, honoured as the first painter to be created a baronet, he remains, as recent exhibitions of his work have demonstrated, equally well known today. In this new study of the artist's life and work Jason Rosenfeld demonstartes that the development of Millais's art was at the forefront of contemporary painting throughout his life. At the same time as Manet and Monet were liberating their nation's art from traditional forms and subjects, Millais was leading British art with the bravura manner and looser symbolic associations of Aestheticism (the most important movement after Pre-Raphaelitism), which in turn influenced the portraits of John Singer Sargent and the landscapes of Vincent Van Gogh. In Rosenfeld's words, it is a 'consistently relevant and inventive Millais' that emerges in this book.