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Auction: 16043 - Autographs, Historical Documents, Ephemera and Postal History
Lot: 63

Documents
John Everett Millais
1871 (22 October) folio A.L.S. to Ludwig Gruner (then director of the Royal Cabinet of Engravings in Dresden, ""Dear Sir. I am delighted to hear so good an opinion of my Holbein. I bought it without a moment’s hesitation upon its merits. If there has been any published criticism on the pictures during the Holbein exhibition I should very much like to have it, as I should like my judgement supported. I have read Mr. Robinson’s letters in the Times, but of course I can form no opinion without seeing the two pictures (the Madonna’s). Some day I hope to visit Dresden and see your picture. My wife desires me to send her best regards to you ... I am staying now in Scotland but when the picture is in my house I will return you your acknowledgement of its being borrowed for the Dresden exhibition". Clean and fine. Photo

Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet, PRA (1829 – 96). A child prodigy, at the age of eleven Millais became the youngest student to enter the Royal Academy Schools. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded at his family home in London, at 83 Gower Street (now number 7). Millais became the most famous exponent of the style, his painting Christ in the House of His Parents (1850) generating considerable controversy. By the mid-1850s Millais was moving away from the Pre-Raphaelite style and developing a new and powerful form of realism in his art. His later works were enormously successful, making Millais one of the wealthiest artists of his day. While early 20th-century critics, reading art through the lens of Modernism, viewed much of his later production as wanting, this perspective has changed in recent decades, as his later works have come to be seen in the context of wider changes and advanced tendencies in the broader late-nineteenth-century art world.

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Estimate
£500 to £600