Highlights Of Venus a.D. MCDLXXXVI

The Muse of Poesie via Konstantin Makovsky

In from a Stroll, 1907, Konstantin Makovsky

Female Nude Reclining on a Divan, 1825, Eugene Delacroix

The Women of the Flame, 1870, Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Message From the Sea, John Everett Millais

Apple Blossoms, 1856, John Everett Millais

Sweet Emma Morland, 1892, John Everett Millais

A child prodigy, at the age of eleven Millais became the youngest student to enter the Royal Academy Schools. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded at his family home in London, at 83 Gower Street (now number 7). Millais became the most famous exponent of the style, his painting Christ in the House of His Parents (1850) generating considerable controversy, and painting perhaps the embodiment of the school, Ophelia, in 1851. However, by the mid-1850s Millais was moving away from the Pre-Raphaelite style and developing a new and powerful 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 advert). 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.

Before the Battle, 1858, Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Photo by George Pitts

The Pia of Tolomei, 1868, Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Photographed by Robert J Davis

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