Millais, Sir John Everett

(born June 8, 1829, Southampton, Hampshire, Eng.—died Aug. 13, 1896, London) British painter and illustrator. In 1848 he became a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelites, a group founded in opposition to contemporary academic painting. His period of greatest achievement came in the 1850s, with The Return of the Dove to the Ark (1851) and one of his greatest public successes, The Blind Girl (1856), a tour de force of Victorian sentiment and technical facility. He was popular as a portraitist and also as a book illustrator, notably for the novels of Anthony Trollope.

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica