John Everett Millais was an English painter, born in Southampton in 1829, who died in London in 1896. At eleven he became the youngest student the Royal Academy schools had ever admitted, and at nineteen he co founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He is remembered for Ophelia, the drowned woman among flowers, for marrying the wife of John Ruskin, and for a boy with a soap bubble that sold Pears soap.
He was a prodigy of the Royal Academy, a rebel against it at nineteen, and its president a few months before he died.
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Ophelia was not painted in one place. The riverbank came first, in the summer of 1851, on the Hogsmill River at Ewell in Surrey, where Millais worked outdoors for about five months. Flowers that bloom in different seasons came out and faded while he was there, and he painted what was in front of him, so blooms of different seasons ended up side by side on the same bank.
The woman came afterwards, in his London studio, and she did not lie in a river. Elizabeth Siddall, a young woman of nineteen who had been working in a hat shop, posed in a bath of water while Millais painted her in a silver embroidered dress that had cost him four pounds. Oil lamps under the bath were supposed to keep the water warm.
The lamps are the reason the painting nearly ended in a lawsuit.
What You'll Discover
How young the Academy's youngest pupil was.
What Dickens saw in a carpenter's shop.
What happened when the lamps went out.
Whose portrait he finished with reluctance.
Who the boy with the bubble became.