The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, in Two Volumes

xvi, 446; xi, 511 pp. Two volume set. Maroon boards with gilt titles on spine, top edge gilt. Includes 316 black-and-white illustrations (photogravures and reproductions of paintings and drawings). John Everett Millais, in full Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet, (born June 8, 1829, Southampton, Hampshire, England - died August 13, 1896, London), English painter and illustrator, and a founding member of the artistic movement known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In 1838 Millais went to London and at the age of 11 entered the Royal Academy schools. Extremely precocious, he won all the academy prizes. In 1848 Millais joined with two other artists, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, to form the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Brotherhood was founded in opposition to contemporary academic painting, which the group believed was the result of the example set by Raphael and which had dominated the schools and academies since his time. At the next year's academy, the novelist Charles Dickens led a violent attack on Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents (1850), which many considered blasphemous because of its lack of idealization and seeming irreverence in the use of the mundane. - Britannica