John Everett Millais was born in Southampton on 8 June 1829, in a family of French descent. In 1838 he attended Henry Sass' Drawing School and at the age of 11 he joined the Royal Academy. While there, he won various medals for his drawings and first exhibited his work at age 17.

His first painting was Pizzarro Seizing the Inca of Peru, 1846. With Rossetti and Hunt, he founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848.

His pictures include Cymon and Iphigenia, Lorenzo and Issabella, The Carpenters Shop, and Mariana and possibly his most famous painting, Ophelia. Some of which can be seen below. Millais died in London on 13 August 1896.

Everett Millais was also an illustrator, completeing work for Moxon's Tennyson and Willmott's Poet's of the 19th Century. He also did forty illustrations for the first two volume edition of Trollope's Orley Farm published by Chapman and Hall in 1862. An image of the title page can be found below.

Work by Millais can be seen in the Tate Gallery, and in Galleries in Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Oxford, Bristol and Aberdeen. A masterpiece by Sir John Everett Millais, showing his daughter asleep, sold for a record £2,091,500 at Christie's in London in June 1999. Put on the market by the Millais family, the painting was expected to fetch £1.5 million.