John Everett Millais

John Everett Millais was a prodigy, the youngest student the Royal Academy in London had ever admitted, at 11. In 1848, still a teenager, he helped found the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a small band of painters who wanted to throw out the brown varnish and easy poses of academic art and paint from nature in sharp, bright detail.

The most famous result is Ophelia, from about 1851. For the drowning Shakespearean heroine he had a model, Elizabeth Siddal, lie for hours in a bath of water kept warm by lamps underneath, until the lamps went out, she caught a serious chill, and her father threatened to sue. The riverbank around her he painted outdoors, leaf by leaf, over four months in Surrey.

Then his life took a strange turn. The critic John Ruskin had championed the young Pre-Raphaelites, and in 1853 he brought Millais to Scotland along with his wife, Effie. Effie's marriage to Ruskin had never been consummated. She had it annulled and married Millais in 1855, in one of the great Victorian scandals, and Queen Victoria refused to receive Effie at court for decades.

Millais went on to become rich and respectable, a baronet and finally President of the Royal Academy in 1896. He died of throat cancer that same year, months after taking the post.