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John Everett Millais (1829-1896) was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the quintessential English gentleman artist. A Baronet and president of the Royal Academy, Millais produced some of the most famous images of his time. His first Pre-Raphaelite work, The Carpenter's Shop, had a dramatic effect on the critics; Charles Dickens famously described his portrayal of the Christ child as a "hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-haired boy in a night-gown." Author Christine Riding analyzes his artistic career, his critics, and his audience, exploring the broader issues that preoccupied his contemporaries on the subject of art itself. ... Read more

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John Everett Millais (1829-1896) was one of the most celebrated figures of Victorian art. As a young man, he founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt. In later years, he rose to wealth, acclaim, and social prestige as a landscapist, illustrator, and painter of subject and genre pictures and as the most successful British portrait painter of his generation. This lavishly illustrated book, published to accompany a major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, is the first comprehensive survey of Millais's portraits. It is also a historically important record of High Victorian England, containing the artist's memorable images of such leading political and cultural figures as Gladstone, Disraeli, Tennyson, Ruskin, Carlyle, and Lillie Langtry. The book includes 100 color reproductions as well as essays by eminent scholars that place Millais's work in the context of his public and private life, making this an authoritative and visually compelling study of the artist's extraordinary contributions to portraiture.

Peter Funnell begins the book by describing Millais's astonishing popularity and the artist's public persona, examining his practice as a portraitist and assessing the view common among later critics that Millais's mature work failed to fulfill his youthful promise. Leonée Ormond examines Millais's early portraits, from his precocious boyhood sketches to his magnificent portrait of Ruskin (1853-54) and his paintings of Ruskin's wife, Effie, who famously left her husband to marry Millais. Malcolm Warner interprets Millais's portraits of children--including the elegiac painting Autumn Leaves (1855-56) and the melancholy Nina Lehmann (1869)--as reflections of Millais's nostalgic ideas about the naturalness, innocence, and beauty of childhood. H. C. G. Matthew assesses Millais's portraits of men of power, which include paintings of four Prime Ministers (Gladstone, Disraeli, Salisbury, and Rosebery). Kate Flint discusses Millais's portraits of women, which ranged from likenesses of family and friends to glamorous paintings of the rich, aristocratic, and beautiful. Each essay is followed by its own thematic catalogue of portraits.

The elegantly written essays and stunning reproductions are supplemented by Warner's extensive documentation about individual works of art, drawings from Millais's sketchbooks, and photographs of the artist in his studio. In its words and images, in its scholarship and its accessibility to the general reader, this is an exceptional book about one of the most influential artists of the nineteenth century.Amazon.com Review
John Everett Millais is still thought of mostly as aPre-Raphaelite painter, but a much longer portion of his career wasdevoted to painting the portraits of the Victorian rich andfamous. Not only did this prove extraordinarily lucrative--Millaisearned what by today's standards would be millions from hisportraits--it offered one of the most talented 19th-century paintersthe chance to fashion powerful and memorable images of the people ofhis age. This book is the catalog to the 1999 Millais Portraitexhibition debuting at the National Gallery in London and travelingaround the United States. It is a much more handsome production thanmost catalogs. The pictures are beautifully reproduced, and in placeof the often bland catalog commentary are essays from four leading arthistorians on Millais's early and Pre-Raphaelite portraits and hisportraits of children, women, and men of power. Altogether, thesewritings provide an absorbing historical and critical context for thepictures. It is in the contrast between a Millais portrait of an oldwoman in black (Isabella Heugh, 1872) and the more famousportrait by James Whistler of his mother (Arrangement in Grey andBlack No. 1, 1871) that Millais's talent as a portraitist isprecisely articulated. Isabella Heugh is not only full ofcharacter but the canvass itself is dynamic and involving with itspotent color scheme and diagonal composition. Next to it, Whistler'sfamous image seems flat and denuded. --Adam Roberts ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

lovely pictures
Great reproductions: gorgeous glowing colours in all their glory. Plodding text, though. Some good scholarly work - and for the first time Millais' later paintings are being taken with the seriousness they deserve. Butthat's about it really. We still get told the ol' story for the mostpart.

Buy it for he pictures (well worth it), for the information (worthit), but not the ideas (there aren't that many). ... Read more

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This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishings Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the worlds literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (2)

A magnificent work with a few shortcomings
For anyone interested in Millais or in Victorian art generally this is a must buy. Many, if not most, illustrations occupy a single page and all appear to be in accurate colors which are vivid and sharp. In addition, many images are accompanied by an analysis, usually on the facing page. And the scope is wide: It covers Millais's career through the years of his declining popularity when the public's interest moved toward impressionism. Then he was undertaking landscape works which are rarely seen in other descriptions of his paintings. In short, this is the definitive examination of his output.
Even so the book is not all it could have been. I am not capable of critically commenting on the text and its analyses. However, I know what I like to see in an illustration. Millais often painted works that were wider than tall. In this book these are presented across the page. This leaves all kinds of white space above and below that could have been used by turning the image ninety degrees thereby presenting a larger image. Nor are all images full-paged. Many are reduced to three by two and a quarter inches. Surprisingly some of the most well-known paintings are less than a full page: for me most notable are "The Boyhood of Raleigh" and "Trust Me." Both are quite shrunken and the latter is not even analyzed. Perhaps the editors deemed that they were too well-known to merit full display.
Although the reader may occasionally grit her or his teeth at the miniaturizing of a favorite, the book is worth the price for its coverage of a marvelous painter.

Well bound and illustrated but short of biographical
The book combines pictures and text half and half. The pictures are mostly half the size of the page, but there are also full size pictures, and a great quality they are. This, actually, is the best in the book. The text, on the other hand, is too small in print, too narrowly restricted to the comment of the work in question or its relation to the time in the painter's life. But it lacks a more fluid narrative of the painter's life. Of course it is not a biography, but it doesn't need to be strictly a biography. It could, and should, have interrelated more fluidly both with the painter's life and his works. The language used isn't that technical, which I deeply appreciate.

Otherwise it's quite a complete set of his finest works. A delight to the eye, although the man keeps being a distant mystery to me, even with his paintings present. ... Read more

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This volume is produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University Library's large-scale digitization efforts. The Library seeks to preserve the intellectual content of items in a manner that facilitates and promotes a variety of uses. The digital reformatting process results in an electronic version of the original text that can be both accessed online and used to create new print copies. The Library also understands and values the usefulness of print and makes reprints available to the public whenever possible. This book and hundreds of thousands of others can be found in the HathiTrust, an archive of the digitized collections of many great research libraries. For access to the University of Michigan Library's digital collections, please see http://www.lib.umich.edu and for information about the HathiTrust, please visit http://www.hathitrust.org ... Read more