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Upon arrival in London, his mother presented her son to the president of the Royal Academy of Arts, Sir Martin Shee. Confronted with a nine-year-old boy, Shee quickly dismissed Mary by suggesting her son would be better served if he trained to sweep chimneys. She persisted, however, and once he saw examples of Millais's work he reversed his opinion. Millais was sent to begin his training at Henry Sass's Academy and was admitted on probation two years later to the Royal Academy. He became a full student in 1846, three years after receiving his first medal for distinction. His youth did not set him apart from his more mature fellows who were generally won over by his cheerful disposition and kind personality. According to Rosenfeld, indeed, "Millais became a favourite of the other pupils, lightly teased for his youth and diminutive size compared to the older students but generally adored".

Despite his fine training, Millais would tire of what he felt were the narrow practices of the Old Masters and the heavy emphasis the Academy placed on the excellence of Renaissance artists, including, and forward of, Raphael. In 1848 he joined a clandestine group of seven young artists made up of fellow Academy students: Dante Gabriel Rosetti, William Holman Hunt, James Collinson, William Michael Rosetti, Frederic George Stephens, and Thomas Woolner. The group would go by the name of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Brotherhood strove for an exacting realism in paintings that drew thematic inspiration from religious, literary, and poetic sources, especially those dealing with the topic of love and death. For his part, Millais, painted many works in this style including one of his greatest masterpieces, Christ in the House of his Parents (The Carpenter's Shop)(1849-50) aged just 21. Tracing a lineage back the works of fifteenth-century "primitives" such as Stefan Lochner and Fra...

The last decades of Millais's life were busy on a professional and a personal front. His acclaim at exhibitions, including the Exposition Universellein Paris in 1878, furthered still his reputation, but in his later years he focused almost exclusively on landscapes and portraiture. For his landscapes, Millais travelled to Scotland where he produced a total of twenty-one vistas, very often under difficult weather conditions. In a letter to his daughter Mary in 1876 he stated, "I could not feel my fingers, and gladly came in to a comfortable fire". While he had created portraits since his early years at the Academy, his mature portraits were rendered in a heavier impasto style which brought him renewed respect. However, it was not his exquisite technical skill so much as his personal manner that his sitters responded to. Fellow artist Louise Jopling, who Millais painted in 1879, said of the artist: he was "the soul of good nature, and entirely without vanity, either personal or about...

Millais played a key role in modernizing art in nineteenth century Britain. As a founder member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood he was part of one of the most radical movements in the history of British art, forming, in the words of art historian Jason Rosenfeld, "a youthfully bold challenge to the staid nature of the Royal Academy and art in general in Britain". As part of their reaction to the negative impact of industrialization, the Pre-Raphaelites revival of medieval styles, stories, and methods of production had a profound influence on the development of the Arts and Crafts movement (itself a precursor to Art Nouveau and Art Deco) and its revival of handicrafts in design. Millais provided inspiration for many different artists, not least Vincent van Gogh who was influenced by his Scottish landscapes. In addition, the air of mystery with which he rendered many of his figures, and the ambiguous narratives in many of his paintings created after he moved away from the Pre-Raphae...