AMSTERDAM.- From 15 February to 18 May 2008, the Van Gogh Museum presents the exhibition John Everett Millais (1829-1896). Millais was the leading painter of the English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the most successful British artist of the second half of the 19th century. This is the first exhibition since 1898 to present all facets of his career and the first monographic overview to be shown in the Netherlands. John Everett Millais contains some 100 paintings and works on paper from many international museums and private collections. One of the exhibition’s highlights is Millais’ painting of Ophelia which has not been exhibited on the continent for almost 30 years. The exhibition is organised in conjunction with Tate Britain in London where John Everett Millais can be seen until 13 January 2008.

The exhibition charts the changes in Millais’ style, from his most uninhibited ‘primitive’ and confrontational works produced during his Pre-Raphaelite period to popular, nostalgic subjects. The atmospheric landscapes that made such an impact on Vincent van Gogh will also be shown.

At the end of 1848 Millais, along with other artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt, set up the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This group of painters, poets and critics rejected the academicism traditionally promulgated by the Royal Academy. They advocated instead a return to a straightforward simplicity in art (dating from before Raphael) which they believed had been lost in the Renaissance. Paintings from this early Pre-Raphaelite period such as Christ in the house of his parents (‘The carpenter's shop’) afforded Millais the image of an ‘enfant terrible’. The detailed realism was denounced as repulsive and perverse. By contrast Millais’ technical skills and his incredibly precise attention to detail were widely praised, also in his later career.

Midway through the 1850s Millais put aside his preference for literary subjects in favour of a new aesthetic. In this he presaged the emergence of the English Aesthetic Movement, whose artists favoured a sensual style aimed at expressing a general poetic mood or the beauty of the modern woman. Just as he had in his earlier Pre-Raphaelite works, Millais imbued these images with an unprecedented depth of psychological insight.

After 1870 Millais turned for inspiration to the tradition of Old Masters such as Titian, Velázquez and Rembrandt. In doing so he reached out to a new public alongside the true connoisseur, one that was particularly keen on drama. As a celebrated English painter he was repeatedly commissioned for portraits of politicians, writers and people from the upper middle classes, such as the poet Alfred Tennyson and Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. He also painted portraits of children, including his own. These intimate children’s portraits frequently feature symbols such as fragile blooms or ephemeral soap bubbles, that underline the fleeting nature of youth.

Central to the exhibition is Millais’ internationally famed Ophelia (1851-1852), inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The painting depicts Ophelia, driven mad by her beloved Hamlet’s murder of her father, drowning herself. The canvas exhibits a subtle play of mysticism, an extremely refined technique and a restrained sense of drama, and has exerted a strong influence on a string of artists after Millais right up to the present day.

John Everett Millais is curated by Alison Smith, curator at Tate Britain, and Jason Rosenfeld, assistant professor at the Marymount Manhattan College, New York.

Presentation Me, Ophelia - Alongside the John Everett Millais exhibition, visitors can view a selection of contemporary photographs that show remarkable parallels with the work of Millais. These photographs by Rineke Dijkstra, Hellen van Meene, Inez van Lamsweede & Vinoodh Matadin and others have mainly been selected by the photographers themselves. It is fascinating to see the extent to which the almost expressionless faces and the static compositions in an estranged environment in both painting and photography resemble one another.