John Everett Millais

Interest in Victorian art is currently enjoying a great revival, and this has led to the rediscovery of John Everett Millais (1829–1896). He was the most talented, prolific and successful of the painters who made up the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Starting out as an enfant terrible, he grew to become an international celebrity and canny marketer of himself as a paragon of Englishness.

Millais’s masterly landscapes, historical figure paintings and society portraits display a highly individual amalgam of poetry, pathos and vitality that entranced the public of his time and continues to fascinate today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Everett_Millais