The Pre-Raphaelites were a band of Victorian radicals inspired by medieval art, poetry, and the natural world. They set out to shake up the stiff conventions of the British art establishment.
Their style is instantly recognizable: jewel-like color, obsessive detail, and striking depictions of women set in richly symbolic scenes.
They’re something of a curiosity in art history, a flash that burned brightly for a few decades. The last vivid spasm of Romanticism in Europe.
The movement began as a rebellion against academic standards led by John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Holman Hunt. They were young artists united more by enthusiasm than anything else.
While Rossetti gave the Pre-Raphaelites their sensual, symbolic style, Millais produced some of the movement’s most technically dazzling and unforgettable paintings. He’s my favorite of the lot.
This guide explores Millais’ most famous paintings from his Pre-Raphaelite years and beyond. Of the original triumvirate, I think he was the star from the very first, with a natural ability for expressive storytelling.
Ophelia
📍Tate Britain, London UK
Ophelia is perhaps the most famous painting of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. With its luminous color and obsessive detail, it captures the group’s fascination with beauty, tragedy, and nature.
The painting depicts the drowning of Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Driven mad with grief after Hamlet kills her father, she falls into a stream and slowly sinks beneath the water.
Millais shows her floating in a billowing white dress, her hands open and her eyes half closed. She seems suspended between life and death.
The artist spent months painting the river landscape outdoors, rendering every plant and flower with remarkable precision. The scene is dense with symbolic vegetation.
When it was first exhibited, critics marveled at its naturalism. Many considered it the most meticulous study of nature ever painted.
The model, Elizabeth Siddal (Rossetti’s wife) posed for hours in a bathtub while Millais worked. According to legend, the water grew cold and she later fell ill with pneumonia.
Mariana
📍 Victoria & Albert Museum, London UK
Millais based this painting on a poem by Alfred Tennyson, which itself draws on a character from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.
Mariana lives in frustrated isolation in a remote farmhouse, abandoned by the lover who once promised to marry her. When her dowry was lost at sea, he cast her aside. Now she waits in limbo, hoping he might return.
Millais captures her in a moment of weary impatience. Clad in a luminous blue dress, she stretches her back after hours of embroidery, her posture conveying frustration and fatigue. Fallen autumn leaves scattered across the floor hint at the slow passage of time.
The color scheme is striking. A brilliant blue gown set against glowing reds and golds.
Behind Mariana, stained glass windows depict the Annunciation. They’re copies of those at Merton College in Oxford. The comparison has often been noted: a woman alone, waiting, caught in a suspended moment of expectation.
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The Blind Girl
📍Birmingham Museum, Birmingham UK
The Blind Girl is a pretty scene of two girls. One is blind and having to employ her other senses to enjoy the world around her. Her companion is probably telling her about the color of the rainbow set against the dark sky.
It was critically admired when it debuted. It has the classic Pre-Raphaelite technical precision and intensity of emotional observation.
It’s very controlled and symbolic. The rainbow signals hope and the blind girl’s face reflects an inner experience vs. the actual outer world.
Some critics, though, saw the work as a bit contrived. This was the first Millais painting to be labeled as “pathetic” due to its sentimentality.
The Woodman’s Daughter
📍Guildhall Art Gallery, London UK
Millais based this painting on a poem by his friend Coventry Patmore. It tells the melancholy story of a friendship between a poor woodman’s daughter and the son of a wealthy squire.
At first, the pair appear innocent enough. But the boy’s offering of fruit hints at temptation and what will follow. It’s a familiar Pre-Raphaelite theme: beauty, seduction, and the shadow of tragedy.
In Patmore’s poem, the two later become lovers. Their different social standing makes marriage impossible. The girl eventually bears an illegitimate child, kills it in despair, and loses her sanity.
Millais painted the luminous landscape outdoors in Oxford and later added the figures in his studio. The scene glows with the saturated greens, purples, and reds that became hallmarks of his early style.
Christ in the House of His Parents
📍Tate Britain, London UK
When Millais exhibited this painting in 1850, it caused a massive scandal. It was simply too real. And it was probably the most talked about painting in the Pre-Raphaelite era.
Instead of presenting a serene and idealized Holy Family, he painted them with gritty realism. To Victorian audiences, the effect felt almost blasphemous.
The scene shows the young Christ in Joseph’s carpentry shop after cutting his hand on a nail. Mary tends to him while the family gathers around. The workshop looks convincingly humble: rough wood, dirty feet, and hands reddened from labor.
Millais also layered the scene with symbolism. Christ’s wounded hand foreshadows the crucifixion. A white dove, symbolizing the Holy Spirit, perches on a ladder nearby.
The painting drew fierce criticism for the extent of its realism, including dirty toenails. Charles Dickens famously called it “horrible in its ugliness,” a reaction that likely reflected Victorian class prejudice as much as artistic judgment.
The Huguenot
📍Private Collection, sometimes exhibited at the Tate Britain
At first glance, this looks like a tender scene. Just a young couple caught in a private moment. But Millais has set it on the eve of something brutal: the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, when thousands of Protestant Huguenots were slaughtered in Paris.
The man is the Huguenot of the title. The woman, pressed close to him, is trying to save him.
Look closely at her hands. She’s fastening a white armband around his sleeve—a small, chilling detail. It’s a Catholic badge of allegiance, meant to mark him as “safe.” She’s pleading without words, bargaining with fabric.
He won’t have it.
That’s the real subject of the painting. Not romance, but refusal. He turns slightly away, resisting her touch, choosing conviction over survival. She leans in harder, as if she can still change his mind.
Millais takes what could have been a sentimental embrace and loads it with tension. You’re watching a last attempt. Quiet, intimate, and already lost.
Lorenzo and Isabella
📍National Gallery of Art, London UK
Millais was just 19 when he painted this early work. The subject comes from Keats’ 1818 poem Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, itself lifted from Boccaccio’s Decameron. In the catalogue entry, lines from Keats’ poem were included.
The story is simple enough. Isabella falls for her brothers’ apprentice instead of the man they’ve chosen for her. It doesn’t end well.
Millais sets the tension right at the table. Lorenzo leans toward Isabella on the right, while her brothers sit opposite, already watching too closely. You can see where this is going.
It’s often called his first fully Pre-Raphaelite painting. The figures feel deliberately awkward. Those stiff poses and flattened space echo early Italian art rather than the polished academic style of his own time.
Then there’s the symbolism. Victorian taste leaned hard toward modesty, but viewers have long pointed out the sexual undertones here, including some fairly blunt phallic imagery. Whether Millais intended it or not, the painting pushes against that buttoned-up surface.
There are a number of motifs used in the painting such as the blood orange the pair share and the passion-flowers around the arch.
The Bridesmaid
📍Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge UK
Millais painted this during his early Pre-Raphaelite phase, and it’s a very good, if slightly under-discussed, work. it looks innocent at first and the turns slightly strange when you look longer. It’s moody.
It shows a young woman holding a sprig of myrtle, traditionally linked to love and marriage. But the real focus is her face and the ring she holds in her hand.
It has that characteristic intense PRB detail: the textures, the fruit, the flower, the jewelry. The symbolism hints at temptation and sexuality, which gives it more bite than it first appears.
To paint it, Millais hired a professional model. She had the classic bright red hair and Pre-Raphaelite “look.”
Peace Concluded
📍Tate Britain, London UK
In Peace Concluded, Millais returns to a pairing he clearly liked: the weakened man and the steady, composed woman.
The scene is set just after the end of the Crimean War. The father has come home, but not triumphantly. He’s slumped in a chair, bandaged, pale, and spent. This isn’t victory. It’s survival.
Around him, the mood shifts. His wife sits upright beside him, controlled and calm, holding the family together by sheer force of will. The children don’t fully grasp the cost of what’s happened. They turn the moment into something almost ceremonial.
One daughter studies his medal, as if it explains everything. The other brings him a dove, a neat symbol of peace that feels both hopeful and slightly naive. At his feet, the dog anchors the scene, a quiet stand-in for loyalty and constancy.
Millais packs a lot into what looks like a domestic tableau. The war is technically over, but its effects are sitting right there in the room. The contrast is the point.
Apple Blossoms
📍Tate Britain, London UK
In this large scale painting, Millais is loosening up the reins of his early Pre-Raphaelite phase. It took him nearly four years to paint.
It’s part of a series where Millais pursued the themes of seasons.
The setting is observed rather than staged. The girls are relaxed, not posed like actors in a morality play.
There’s something quietly modern about it. Nothing really happens. It’s just captures a moment in nature.
It can feel a bit idealized. It doesn’t have the edge or tension of his earlier work.
First and Second Sermons, 1863
📍Guildhall Art Gallery, London UK
These two paintings show Millais’ daughter Effie, in church.
In the first one, his daughter is trying to be attentive. It’s a very natural observation of a child trying to restrain her restlessness.
In the second one, the joke lands. You see that she’s fallen asleep in the pew. This work is therefore relatable, slightly humorous, and emotionally easy.
The paintings helped cement Millais’ shift into and reputation as a painter of domestic subjects. These are much less edgy than his early Pre-Raphaelite works.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my guide to the most famous paintings of John Everett Millais. You may enjoy these other London travel guides:
- 5 Days in London Itinerary
- Guide To Free Museums in London
- London art bucket list
- Best day trips from London
- Tourist Traps To Avoid in London
- Hidden Gems in London
- Best Museums in London
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