SIR JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS P.R.A.
1829 – 1896
The Old Kirk of Fetteresso
Pencil & Watercolour
Signed & dated ’66
Inscribed on back board, with labels stating This picture was painted by Sir John Millais in 1866 and given to Auntie Mary 18th Nov 1867
Trade label from The Leger Galleries, Old Bond Street, London, and dated May 1996
Frame size: 15¾ x 20 inches / 40 x 50.8 cm
Stock number: AA6125/0120
Price: £12,750
Sir John Everett Millais
John Everett Millais was a British painter and founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood alongside Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt. The artist’s most famous work was Ophelia (1851), a melancholy painting depicting the beflowered and drowned woman from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. “For my own part, I have often been labored, but whatever I am I am never careless. I may honestly say that I have never placed on idle touch on canvas; and that I have always been honest and hardworking; yet the worst pictures I ever painted in my life are those into which I threw the most trouble and labor,” he once confessed. Born on June 8, 1829 in Southampton, United Kingdom, Millais joined the Royal Academy schools at the age of 11, where his precocious talent won him a number of awards. In 1848, Millais, Rossetti, and Hunt formed their brotherhood as a reaction against the academic painting of the time, developing their painted scenes from medieval and Early Renaissance themes. Over the course of his career, Millais’s rebellion towards the establishment gave way as he was appointed a full professor and later president of the Royal Academy. The artist died on August 13, 1896 in London, United Kingdom. Today, his works are held in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Tate Gallery in London, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among others
