Sir John Everett Millais was an English Pre-Raphaelite Painter. He was born in St. Helier, Jersey, England. He studied at the Royal Academy Schools where he meets William Holman Hunt, whose ideas about painting Sir John Everett found very exciting. Together with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Sir John Everett set out to paint with a simplicity and ingenuousness which they took to be the spirit in which mediaeval art was practiced. They believed implicitly inaccurate realism and bright color. Sir John Everett particularly used a technique whereby he painted in color on a wet white ground to achieve great effects of luminosity. His Pre-Raphaelite picture Christ in the House of His Parents brought upon him a storm of criticism. His greatest paintings were perhaps his subject less figurative pictures, The Blind Girl and Autumn Leaves, of the mid 1850's. Later he reverted to a more anecdotal style of subject picture and gave way to a tendency to paint winsome children in a style which, while it derives from Velazquez, is still over-sweet and sometimes coy. Sir John Everett Millais was a remarkable draughtsman and illustrator; the series of drawings of modern life subjects which he did in 1853-1854 reflect the moral crisis in which he found himself when he and John Ruskin's (1819-1900) wife Ellie fell in love. In his later career Sir John Everett Millais gained a great popular reputation and become very rich largely as a result of the lucrative sale of copyrights of his pictures to print publishers. He was made President of the Royal Academy after Frederic Leighton's death in 1896, but died the same year.