James Baquet

    Born in England two years before Maxwell’s birth in Scotland, John Everett Millais (1829-1896), while a good painter, was more famous because of his role in founding something called the “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.”

    A little background is necessary in order to understand this philosophy.

    In the early days of the Renaissance, paintings were made with a wealth of detail, vivid colors, and complex composition. Raphael (1483-1520) and Michelangelo (1475-1564) represented a change from this style, using, for example, simpler, more balanced composition. This led to Mannerism, a hard-to-define term which indicates a certain artificial (“mannered”) element in painting.

    Millais and his friends felt this was a deviation from what art should be. With William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in 1848 he formed the “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,” later called simply the “Pre-Raphaelites.” Four others joined the “Brotherhood,” and later numerous painters were associated with this attempt to capture the style “before Raphael.”

    I must confess that this is my favorite school of painting, with its colors, complexity, choices of subjects from the Bible and literature, and faithfulness to nature. The opposite was termed “sloshy” by the Brotherhood, a term meaning lax or badly done, and therefore commonplace and boring.

    Millais found himself at the center of controversy in 1850 when he exhibited his “Christ in the House of His Parents,” also called “The Carpenter’s Shop.” The extreme faithfulness of the rendition of everyday people caused Charles Dickens to call the portrayal of Mary, the mother of Jesus, “ugly,” and he said that Millais had made the family look like “alcoholics and slum-dwellers.” Nevertheless, critics like John Ruskin praised the work.

    Millais’s style evolved away from the Pre-Raphaelite standards later in his life. He died a successful and prominent artist, president of the Royal Academy of Arts, and was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.

    Vocabulary

    Which word above means:

    1. truth, accuracy

    2. people who are addicted to drinking

    3. a group of people sworn to support each other

    4. interpretation, performance

    5. showing (as in a picture)

    6. made up of many parts, difficulty

    7. change from what is expected or acceptable

    8. people who live in very poor conditions

    9. famous, well-known

    10. everyday, usual