Millais displayed talent at a very early age - this Bust of a Greek Warrior (1838-9) was drawn when he was just nine. Geoffroy Richard Everett Millais Collection courtesy Tate

Aesthetic adventurer Graham Spicer ventures to Tate Britain to take in the long and varied career of John Everett Millais

John Everett Millais was among the most innovative and lauded of 19th century British artists. From a prodigal youth and an anti-establishment bent to acceptance and absorption into the mainstream, his career was long and wildly successful.

A new exhibition at Tate Britain, running from September 26 until January 13 2008, brings together more than 140 paintings and works on paper from all stages of his career in the largest display of his art since 1967.

Millais lived from 1829-1896 and started his artistic career early, showing a remarkable talent in his youth, becoming, at the age of 11, the youngest ever pupil to be accepted at the Royal Academy’s school.

Ophelia (1851-2) remains one of the iconic Pre-Raphaelite works. © Tate

Early works, like Bust of a Greek Warrior, made when Millais was only nine, show his draughtsmanship skills, which he would develop during his six years at the Academy.

Millais was not destined to follow an orthodox path, however, and by 1848 had formed a secretive artistic society - the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood - with a group of likeminded artists who were challenging the established veneration of high Renaissance art.

Millais, along with William Holman Hunt, the brothers Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Michaeol Rossetti, Frederic George Stephens, James Collinson and Thomas Woolner, rejected what they saw as the pompous and grandiose work of the late Renaissance art of Raphael and his followers and instead harked back to medieval and early Renaissance traditions.

Sophie Gray (1857). Private collection courtesy Peter Nahum, Leicester Galleries, London

The Pre-Raphaelites wanted to be as honest and true to life as possible, with Millais’ works like the iconic Ophelia (1851-2) displaying a highly naturalistic representation of nature around a tragic scene.

This approach was fresh and shocking to Victorian eyes, with Christ in the House of His Parents (1849-50) causing particular outrage, for its depiction of the holy family in a plain carpentry workshop, dirt and clutter surrounding them.

Millais’ ‘medievalism’ of these works was to give way to an expanded repertoire of subjects and less slavish attention to naturalism, sometimes removing background detail altogether so that he could complete paintings at a faster rate.

The North-West Passage (1874). © Tate

From the 1850s he concentrated on ‘anecdotal’ works, drawing on ordinary people in heartbreaking situations, often placing them in definite historical moment, such as A Huguenot (1851-2), depicting a persecuted French protestant saying farewell to his sweetheart, his future uncertain.

As the Pre-Raphaelite approach became accepted into the mainstream Millais moved on, distancing himself from the need to make literal representations and delving into more ambiguous, sensual and opulent works, like the landmark painting Sophie Gray (1857), an arresting image of his young sister-in-law, combining the innocence of youth with the blossoming of womanhood.

Works like this idealised a new, modern representation of female beauty and were hugely influential, but this so-called ‘aestheticism’ was by no means the end of Millais’ developing style and choice of subject matter.

Bubbles (1886), one of the first examples of art used for advertising. Unilever, on loan to Lady Lever Art Gallery, National Museum Liverpool

He became freer and looser with his paintwork, taking inspiration from Old Masters like Rembrandt and Velazquez, and from the 1860s transferred this onto a grand scale, working up some of his most famous images, like The Princes in the Tower (1878) and The Boyhood of Raleigh (1870).

As Millais’ family grew (he was to have eight children) he experimented with the ‘Fancy Picture’, sentimental staged scenes of children. While some can seem rather trite to modern eyes, at the time they were hugely successful, and introduced the artist to a mass audience, sealing his fame and wealth.

Cherry Ripe (1879) was reprinted in colour some 600,000 times in The Graphic magazine and Bubbles (1886) became one of the first artworks to be used in advertising (for Pear’s soap) and instantly recognisable.

Millais was the most successful artist in Britain, and with it came powerful patronage, as he was asked to paint portraits of politicians, actors, poets, writers and the rising middle classes.

Louise Jopling (1879). National Portrait Gallery

The exhibition shows a frieze of eight arresting portraits, placing Alfred Tennyson and political adversaries Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone next to the renowned actor Henry Irving and the striking image of Millais’ friend and fellow artist Louise Jopling.

These portraits’ dark backgrounds and lack of regalia or badges of rank identifying the sitters only help to increase their impact, letting their features shine through.

To round off this epic seven-room exhibition, the style takes an unexpected turn, with 12 of Millais’ 21 large-scale Scottish landscapes on display, the largest grouping of them in one place since 1898.

With a growing abstraction evident in works like Dew Drenched Furze (1889-90), it reinforces the fact that Millais was changing and experimenting up to the end of his career, and was so much more than the leading light of the Pre-Raphaelites.

Want to find out more about the Pre-Raphaelites? 24 Hour Museum's Richard Moss explores this fascinating moment in British cultural history in an in-depth trail around the UK -
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The Pre-Raphaelites