John Everett Millais
Fundamental Paintings to Understand the History of Painting
Ofelia (1851/52). John Everett Millais.
Oil on canvas. 76 cm x 112 cm
Tate Britain. London, England.
In the first half of the 19th century, there was a real English school of painting, governed by a Royal Academy that was quite strict in its teachings and in the training of artists. Millais was accepted into that Academy at the age of 11, obviously because he was a prodigy.
John Everett Millais is well known in the history of art for being one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He talked about the “decadence of British painting,” which had become too conventional, corny, and vulgar due to academic rigidity.
Pre-Raphaelites like him proposed breaking with the Academy and returning to the spirit of medieval art and that of the Italian Renaissance before Raphael (hence the name of the brotherhood). They were after purity, free from all artifice, and free of the mannerism of painting that had been imposed for three centuries. In short, they were against elegant but empty painting.
It is very provocative to break with the present, to go back three hundred years.
However, the combination of that spirit of another era with the technical precision of the moment, results in works of almost unparalleled beauty. The painting we have chosen, depicting Ophelia from Hamlet, is the perfect example of this.
It was a crucial point in the history of painting, where artists were about to stop looking for that perfect representation of the world outside them, and to start expressing their emotions and their own visions of the world. Modernity was about to arrive.
Millais was a prodigy. At the same time he demonstrates that great artists are as human in their miseries as most mortals: one or two years after this painting, the artist took distance from his Pre-Raphaelite companions and returned to academicism, to recognition, to commercialism, to a life full of material pleasures, to an exquisitely pretentious and sweet painting.
Recommended links:
Ulysses and the Sirens (1891), John William Waterhouse.
Stories Behind Works of Art: The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli.
The Madonnas of Botticelli and the Differences with those of Raphael.
You can also find more material using the search engine.
0 Comments