Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we're tackling
a real giant of Victorian art, Sir John Everett
Millais. His life story, honestly, it reads like
fiction from this like radical young painter.
To a pillar of the establishment. It's quite
the journey. It really is. Almost two different
artists in one lifetime. You know, he starts
as this key figure in the Pre -Raphaelite Brotherhood,
totally anti -establishment, and ends up Sir
John, a baronet, incredibly wealthy president
of the Royal Academy. Exactly. So the sources
we're digging into today, they trace this whole
arc. How does someone go from shocking the critics
to, well, setting the trends and even famously
selling soap? That's the core question, and you
can almost boil down that tension, that contradiction
to two moments. Okay, what are they? Well, first,
he's this astonishing child prodigy, gets into
the Royal Academy School as the youngest student
they'd ever had, 11 years old. 11, that's unbelievable.
Right, pure, raw talent. Then, fast forward decades
later, one of his most famous paintings, Bubbles,
it ends up being used as an advert for pear soap.
The soap ad. That's probably what sticks in a
lot of people's minds, isn't it? It is. And that
contrasts the intense artistic purity of his
youth versus the, let's say, sentimental commercialism
later on. That's the fault line we're exploring.
We have to understand the early shockwaves he
created first, though. Okay, let's unpack that.
Where does this radical talent even come from?
He was born in Southampton, 1829, but his family
had strong Jersey roots. Very strong. And he
was... fiercely proud of it. There's that great
story about William Thackeray, the author. Thackeray
apparently asked him, sort of teasingly, you
know, when did England conquer Jersey? Okay.
And Millais, apparently without missing a beat,
just shoots back, never. Jersey conquered England.
Huh. That tells you something about his confidence,
doesn't it? Absolutely. That sort of inherent
self -belief. And it wasn't just him. His mother,
Emily Mary Millais, she was a huge driving force.
The sources describe her as having a forceful
personality. Understatement, maybe. She saw his
talent early on, and, well, she basically engineered
his career path. She moved the whole family to
London, specifically to get him connections,
to get him into the Royal Academy. Wow. Millais
himself said later, very simply, I owe everything
to my mother. Her drive was crucial. And it worked.
Getting into the RA schools at 11 in 1840, I
mean, that's just unprecedented. This is the
absolute heart of the establishment art world.
Totally. The place you went to learn the rules,
the classical stuff. But ironically, it's there,
inside the academy walls, that he meets William
Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The other
key figures. Exactly. And these three young guys,
full of ambition and, frankly, fed up with the
state of British art. They're a rebellion. Pretty
much. They found the Pre -Raphaelite Brotherhood,
the PRB, in September 1847. And the meeting happens
right there in Millais' family home on Gower
Street. So what was their beef, exactly? What
were they rebelling against? Pre -Raphaelite
or for Raphael? Precisely. They felt that art
after Raphael, you know, high Renaissance and
onwards had become kind of stale, artificial,
overly reliant on formulas. They wanted to go
back to the intensity, the detail, the sort of
moral seriousness of Italian art before Raphael.
So more realism. More detail. Obsessive detail.
That was the hallmark. Intense observation of
nature, rendering everything, every leaf, every
thread, every texture with almost scientific
precision. You mentioned the phrase pictorial
ecosystem. Yeah, I remember reading that. That's
it. Their paintings are incredibly dense. They
often painted on a wet white ground to get this
amazing luminosity, which was super demanding,
slow work. And applying this hyper realism to
religious subjects. Well, that's where the trouble
started. Right. Like with Christ in the house
of his parents. Right. 4950. Oh, big trouble.
That painting caused an absolute uproar because
instead of the usual serene, idealized holy family,
he painted them like actual working people. Exactly.
In a messy carpenter's workshop, realistic Burt,
worn hands, the shavings on the floor. It was
seen as shockingly irreverent, blasphemous even
to some. And the critics went wild. I remember
Dickens was particularly savage. Charles Dickens
absolutely unloaded on it, wrote this scathing
review anonymously at first in his magazine Household
Words. What did he say? He called Malaise's Mary
ugly and ghastly and described the young Christ
as a hideous, wry -necked, blubbering, red -haired
boy in a nightgown. Just brutal. Wow. No holding
back. None at all. It really shows how deeply
malaise's realism offended the establishment
view of how sacred subjects should look. But
then, not long after, he paints Ophelia, 1851
-52. Still incredibly detailed, but maybe less.
religiously provocative. Ophelia is maybe the
ultimate PRB painting in terms of that naturalist
focus and sheer beauty. The detail is astonishing.
He spent something like five months painting
just the background foliage outdoors by the Hogs
Mill River. Five months on the background. Yeah,
battling the elements. And then you have the
story of the model, Elizabeth Sittle. Posing
in the bathtub. Floating in a bathtub full of
water, kept warm by lamps underneath. Except
the lamps went out, she got incredibly ill. It
just shows the lengths they went to for that
realism. That's dedication. Or obsession, maybe.
A bit of both, probably. But while Ophelia and
Christ were controversial, he did start to find
popular success, too, didn't he? With paintings
like A Huguenot. Right, A Huguenot. Yeah. 1851
-52, again, that one seemed to hit a different
nerve. It did. It had that PRB detail, but it
also had this really powerful, relatable human
story. A couple... torn apart by religious conflict
during the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, people
responded to the emotion. So he could blend the
technique with popular themes? He was learning
how. He was proving he could be radical and connect
with the public. He was on his way up. But then
everything changes. The scandal. The scandal.
It all revolves around John Ruskin. The famous
art critic. The one who actually defended the
PRB against Dickens. The very same. Ruskin was
their champion, their intellectual supporter.
He and Millais became quite close friends. And
Ruskin introduces Millais to his wife, Effie
Gray. Correct. Effie then models for Millais,
for his painting, The Order of Release in 5253.
They spend a lot of time together. And they fall
in love? Deeply. Now, the context here is crucial,
as you know. Effie and Ruskin had been married
for several years. But the marriage was unconsummated.
Exactly. Ruskin hadn't... Well, whatever reason,
hotly debated by historians, he hadn't fulfilled
the marriage physically. Which back then was
grounds for an annulment, right? Not divorce,
but saying the marriage never legally existed.
Precisely. It was a very rare out for women.
Effie's parents got involved. She filed for annulment
based on Ruskin's impotence. And it was granted
in 1854. It was a massive public scandal. And
the following year, 1855. Effie marries John
Millay. Yes. Which professionally for Millay
was complicated. Complicated how? Well, for starters,
he'd completely alienated John Ruskin, arguably
the most powerful voice in British art criticism.
Ruskin was never going to support his work again.
In fact, quite the opposite. Right. And personally.
Personally, he now had a wife and very quickly
a growing family. They ended up having eight
children together. Eight? That's a lot of mouths
to feed in Victorian London. It's a huge financial
undertaking. They move into a big house, 7 Cromwell
Place in Kensington from 1862. Millais needed
to earn serious money. And quickly. And this
is where the big shift in his painting style
comes in. The move away from that painstaking
PRB detail. Directly linked, according to many
sources, he started painting much faster using
a broader technique. Less meticulous detail,
looser brushwork, thicker paint application impasto.
Why the change in technique? Just speed. Speed
was definitely a factor. That slow, layered PRB
method just wasn't efficient if you needed to
produce a lot of paintings to sell. The broader
style allowed him to finish canvases much, much
faster. So a practical decision driven by money
and family. That's certainly how his critics
saw it. And the backlash was immediate and fierce.
Ruskin probably still stinging from the annulment.
He called the new style a catastrophe. A catastrophe.
Not just bad, but like a tragic fall from grace.
And others piled on. William Morris, another
former associate. The designer and socialist.
Yeah. Morris basically accused Millais outright
of selling out. sacrificing his artistic soul
for money and popularity, joining the establishment
he once fought against. Ouch. Did Millay ever
defend himself against this? I mean, being called
a sellout couldn't have felt good. No, and he
didn't just take it. Later on, he argued back.
He wrote an article in 1888, Thoughts on Our
Art of Today, where he basically said the change
wasn't about selling out. It was about growing
confidence. Confidence? How so? He argued that
as he matured, he didn't need the super tight
detail anymore. He could paint with more boldness,
more freedom. He even cited old masters like
Velazquez and Rembrandt as his models. Velazquez
and Rembrandt, known for their loose, suggestive
brushwork. Exactly. He was framing it as an evolution.
towards a different kind of mastery, not a decline.
Was that just spin, though? A way to justify
the need to pay the bills? Or did people actually
buy the artistic argument? That's the million
-dollar question, isn't it? For the purists...
Like Ruskin and Morris. No, it was purely commercial.
But for others, especially younger artists and
critics, they did see something else happening.
Like what? They saw that this broader style,
this focus on bolder effects, actually connected
with new trends emerging in the 1860s and 70s.
It wasn't just about speed. It was maybe unintentionally
at first tapping into the aesthetic movement.
Ah, art for art's sake. Less about story, more
about beauty and color and form. Precisely. Meleza's
work started moving away from complex narratives
towards more symbolic, atmospheric stuff. Paintings
like the Eve of St. Agnes or the Somnambulist.
And sources say he was actually supportive of
Whistler, James McNeill Whistler, a key aesthetic
figure. He was. He recognized the shift happening.
His later work, with its broad areas of color
and focus on mood, gained admiration from people
who saw links to Whistler to Albert Moore. even
saw his influence on the next generation like
John Singer Sargent. So he was adapting, keeping
himself relevant, even as tastes changed. Very
successfully. And by the 1870s, he's leaning
into this establishment role. He starts referencing
the great British portraitists like Sir Joshua
Reynolds alongside Velazquez again. And he paints
these big, grand historical subjects. Themes
that would resonate with Victorian Britain's
sense of itself. Absolutely. Things like the
two princes Edward and Richard in the Tower tapping
into royal history and tragedy. Or paintings
celebrating exploration and empire like the Northwest
Passage or... Boyhood of Raleigh. These are big
patriotic statements cementing his role as like
the nation's painter. Pretty much. But, you know,
for all the grand history paintings, what really
made him incredibly wealthy and a household name?
The children's portraits. The children's portraits.
This was his path to megastardom and serious
money. He painted these incredibly charming,
often sentimental pictures of children that the
public just adored. Things like Cherry Ripe featuring
those Pettigrew sisters who became famous models
themselves. Exactly. And an idol of 1745. But
the absolute peak, or maybe the most controversial
point, was bubbles. 1886. Bubbles. The painting
of his little grandson, Willie James, blowing
a soap bubble. That's the one. And the painting
itself was popular. But what happened next is
key. The rights were bought by A &F Pears, the
soap company. And they turned it into one of
the most famous advertisements ever. They did.
Slapped the Pears soap logo on it and reproduced
it everywhere. It became synonymous with the
brand. Idealized childhood innocents used to
sell soap. Was that the first time high art was
used so directly in mass advertising? It was
certainly one of the most high profile and defining
moments. It sparked huge debate. Was Millais
bringing art to the masses? Or had the ultimate
pre -Raphaelite rebel finally, definitively sold
his soul to commerce? What did Millais think?
Was he okay with it? Well, he was paid very well
for it. Apparently he initially resisted, but
eventually agreed. It cemented his popular fame,
but also solidified the sellout narrative for
his detractors. And it wasn't just paintings,
right? He was doing commercial work in other
areas too. Illustration. Hugely successful book
illustrator. Very well paid for it, too. He did
illustrations for big names like Anthony Trollope,
poems by Tennyson. His skill with narrative from
the PRB days must have helped there. Absolutely.
And some of his illustrations were artworks in
their own right. Those complex drawings he did
for the Parables of Jesus, published in 1864.
Yes. They were so highly regarded, they were
later adapted into stained glass windows for
a church in Scotland, Kinnell Parish Church.
So he's operating across fine art, history painting,
portraiture, advertising, illustration. He's
everywhere. A true Victorian multimedia star,
in a way. You could say that, and the official
art establishment absolutely embraced him. His
Royal Academy career track reflects that, doesn't
it? Yeah. Associate member in 53, full member
by 63. Right. He was a major figure within the
Academy for decades. But the absolute pinnacle
of establishment recognition comes in 1885. Queen
Victoria steps in. Queen Victoria makes him Sir
John Everett Millais Baronet, a hereditary title.
The first artist ever to get a hereditary title,
not just a knighthood. The very first. It was
monumental. It basically integrated him and his
lineage into the British aristocracy, the ultimate
insider status for the former rebel. And then
right at the end of his life, the final institutional
crown. Elected president of the Royal Academy
in 1896, after Lord Leighton died, he'd reached
the absolute top. Though, sadly, he didn't hold
the position for long. Before we get to the end,
there's that other fascinating thread in his
later work, The Landscapes. especially the Scottish
ones. Yes, this is a really important counterpoint
to the popular, sometimes sentimental, work.
From about 1870 onwards, he starts painting these
large -scale landscapes, often inspired by his
annual hunting and fishing trips to Perthshire.
And these weren't pretty picturesque scenes.
Not at all. They're often quite bleak, autumnal,
moody. Think windswept moors, desolate locks,
a sense of melancholy in the passage of time.
Very atmospheric. Does that connect back somehow
to the mood of his earlier works? Like autumn
leaves? I think it does. There's an emotional
depth there, a focus on transience. He's not
painting with that microscopic PRB detail anymore,
obviously. But the intensity of observation is
still there. It's just expressed differently
with broader strokes, capturing the feel of the
place. Any cue examples? Chill October from 1870
is often seen as the first major one. Really
captures that damp end of year feeling. Or later,
Christmas Eve, 1887, which was his first big
snow scene, all fog and texture. They show he
was still capable of profound, serious work alongside
the popular stuff. So he becomes president of
the RA in 1896, the peak of his career. But he
dies later that same year, August 1896. Throat
cancer. And his last painting was unfinished.
Yeah, the last track. Based on an illustration
for his son's book, apparently depicting a hunter
lying dead in the wilderness, a rather somber
final image. And given his status? He was buried
in St. Paul's Cathedral, the ultimate establishment
resting place. But even after his death, the
controversies continued. There was something
about his statue. Oh, yes. The Prince of Wales
commissioned a statue by Thomas Brock, which
was put up outside the Tate Gallery in 1905.
A tribute to a national hero, right? Seems straightforward
enough. But fast forward to the mid -20th century.
Modernism is dominant, and Victorian art, especially
someone like Millais, seen as the epitome of
the establishment, is deeply unfashionable. So
the statue becomes a problem. A big problem for
some. The Tate director at the time, Norman Reed,
actually tried repeatedly to get the statue removed
in the 50s and 60s. Removed? Why? He famously
called its presence positively harmful. For Reid
and the modernist viewpoint, Malaya represented
everything outdated, sentimental, narrative -driven,
commercially successful art. The statue was a
symbol of a past they wanted to bury. Millais
was the ultimate sellout whose ghosts needed
exercising. So the statue represented a kind
of artistic embarrassment. To the modernist gatekeepers,
yes. It was a sign that Britain hadn't fully
embraced the correct path of our history. Reid
failed to get it removed completely for years,
but it was eventually moved to a less prominent
spot in 2000. Still a bit contentious. But that
negative view, that dismissal of his later work,
that seems to have changed again more recently,
hasn't it? Massively. There's been a huge reassessment.
Art historians now look at his later style not
just as a commercial compromise, but in the context
of wider European art trends. That looser brushwork,
the focus on color and mood, the speed. It's
now seen less as selling out and more as anticipating
aspects of impressionism or aestheticism. His
move away from pure narrative is seen as, well...
almost proto -modernist in its own way. The catastrophe
Ruskin saw is now viewed as an interesting evolution.
And beyond the art history debates, his personal
story keeps him in the public eye. That Ruskin
-Effie -Malace triangle is just too dramatic
to ignore. Absolutely. It's perfect fodder for
drama. You've got films like Effie Gray from
2014, the BBC series Desperate Romantics. That
story guarantees he won't just be a dusty name
in a textbook. People connect with the human
drama. And the public still turns out for his
exhibitions. In huge numbers, that big Tate Britain
retrospective in 2007, it pulled in over 150
,000 visitors in London alone. And when it traveled
internationally, Amsterdam, Japan, the total
audience was over 660 ,000. That tells you something.
It really does. People still want to see his
work, all of it. Radical, establishment, controversial,
sentimental. It's all part of the story now,
and people are fascinated by the whole package.
So wrapping this up, it's an incredible journey.
Youngest RA student. revolutionary pre -Raphaelite,
shocks everyone. Then the scandal, the marriage,
the eight kids, the style shift. Becomes Sir
John the Baronet, paints bubbles, gets elected
president of the RA, all while doing these moody
Scottish landscapes. It's almost too much for
one life. It really is. The connection between
the personal drama needing to support Effie and
the family and the professional change seems
undeniable, though. It seems like the engine,
doesn't it? Personal circumstances, financial
pressure, maybe growing artistic confidence,
too. It all combined to reshape his career, a
career that was revolutionary, then widely criticized
as a sellout, and now kind of rehabilitated as
complex and maybe even predictive. So the final
thought for you listening to this, what do we
make of Malay today? You have the intense, painstaking
detail of Ophelia, on one hand, absolute artistic
devotion. And on the other, you have the immense
popularity and commercial afterlife of Bubbles,
the soap ad. He faced harsh judgment for choosing
popularity and wealth. But if that later work,
the supposed sellout stuff, is now seen as forward
looking in some ways. Does that change how we
view the choice? Does massive enduring popularity
ultimately offer its own kind of validation,
even if it comes at the cost of early ideals?
Maybe Millais' real genius wasn't just the early
radicalism, but his ability to navigate the pressures,
adapt and thrive in the complex world of art,
commerce and family. It's a timeless dilemma
for any creator, isn't it? Integrity versus success,
purity versus popularity. Millais lived that
conflict perhaps more dramatically than anyone.