John Everett Millais 75 High Resolution Images

John Everett Millais was a Victorian Pre-Raphaelite artist who was enormously successful in his lifetime and one of the wealthiest of his day. His works include portraits, cutesy chocolate box images and landscapes, including the famous Pears Soap advert featuring his painting 'Bubbles'.

This download features 75 hi-res images, in jpeg format, by the artist John Everett Millais.

The images are all 600dpi and range in size from 3174 pixels wide/tall to 7720 pixels wide/tall.

The pictures are out of copyright and in the public domain, so you are free to use them in whatever way you'd like, including commercial use.

Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896) was an English painter and illustrator who was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was a child prodigy who, aged eleven, became the youngest student to enter the Royal Academy Schools. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded at his family home in Gower Street, London. Millais became the most famous exponent of the style, his painting Christ in the House of His Parents (1849–50) generating considerable controversy, and he produced a picture that could serve as the embodiment of the historical and naturalist focus of the group, Ophelia, in 1851–52.

By the mid-1850s, Millais was moving away from the Pre-Raphaelite style to develop a new form of realism in his art. His later works were enormously successful, making Millais one of the wealthiest artists of his day, but some former admirers including William Morris saw this as a sell-out (Millais notoriously allowed one of his paintings to be used for a sentimental soap advertisement). While these and early 20th-century critics, reading art through the lens of Modernism, viewed much of his later production as wanting, this perspective has changed in recent decades, as his later works have come to be seen in the context of wider changes and advanced tendencies in the broader late nineteenth-century art world, and can now be seen as predictive of the art world of the present.

Millais's personal life has also played a significant role in his reputation. His wife Effie was formerly married to the critic John Ruskin, who had supported Millais's early work. The annulment of the Ruskin marriage and Effie's subsequent marriage to Millais have sometimes been linked to his change of style, but she became a powerful promoter of his work and they worked in concert to secure commissions and expand their social and intellectual circles.

After his marriage in 1855, Millais began to paint in a broader style, which was condemned by Ruskin as "a catastrophe". It has been argued that this change of style resulted from Millais's need to increase his output to support his growing family (he and Effie had eight children). His admirers, in contrast, pointed to the artist's connections with Whistler and Albert Moore, and influence on John Singer Sargent. Millais himself argued that as he grew more confident as an artist, he could paint with greater boldness. In his article "Thoughts on our Art of Today" (1888), he recommended Velázquez and Rembrandt as models for artists to follow.

In 1870 Millais returned to full landscape pictures, and over the next twenty years painted a number of scenes of Perthshire where he was annually found hunting and fishing from August until late into the autumn each year. Christmas Eve, his first full landscape snow scene, painted in 1887, was a view looking towards Murthly Castle.