John Everett Millais

John Everett Millais was a prodigy who entered the Royal Academy schools at eleven, helped found the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood at nineteen, and then spent his later career painting the kind of thing the Brotherhood had formed to oppose.

Ophelia is the picture that survives everything. Elizabeth Siddal posed in a bath for months while Millais painted the riverbank plants from life at Ewell, each species identifiable. She caught a serious cold when the lamps warming the water went out.

Ruskin championed the group and then lost his wife Effie to Millais, a scandal that outlasted several of the paintings. The late portraits and sentimental subjects sold enormously well, one was used to advertise soap, and critics have been holding it against him ever since.