Into Millais' world ... the ODNB's special website dedicated to Millais and his circle
One of the most appealing aspects of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's paintings is that that the decadent, dreamy drama depicted in their canvases paled in comparison to the actual lives they led. Millais, the first major solo survey of John Everett Millais' work since 1967, and the first exhibition since 1898 to examine his entire career, opened at Tate Britain this week.
To celebrate the opening, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has launched Millais: Circles and Sitters, an in-depth account of the Victorian master and his friends, available in advance to Guardian readers.
This special content is part of the 111 new biographies that have been added to the site this October. The three-year-old subscription-based website, which can also be accessed for free at most libraries and academic institutions, provides elegantly written, insightful and informative biographies of Millais' intimates, including Dante and Christina Rossetti, Wilkie Collins, Lillie Langtry, Benjamin Disraeli and Elizabeth Siddall, the sad beautiful girl who modelled for Ophelia, one of the era's most famous works of art.
Although the focus in ODNB's more than 50,000 articles is the life stories of people who died in or before 2003, the Millais section also spotlights information on the history of the famous Bubbles painting, best known as the original Pears Soap advert, through a link to the life of Thomas James Baratt, the famous Victorian soap manufacturer who bought Millais' painting of a boy and used it as his product's public face.
And the ODNB's coverage of Millais' circle is only a taste of the scholarly and accessibly worded biographies written by 12,500 specialist contributors to the site, one of which is emailed every day to subscribers through ODNB's "Life of the Day" series. According to the site, it is the largest collaborative research project in the humanities; and unlike Wikipedia where anyone can write anything, ODNB has 14 external consultant editors and 400 associate editors who vet new subject pitches and peer review submissions to assure academic quality and veracity. An example of the authors' genuine knowledge of their subjects is that Virginia Surtees, the author of the passionately written post on Siddell's tragic life, has also written the catalogue raisonné for Dante Gabriel Rossetti for Oxford University Press.
Not all the people profiled here will have led lives as scintillating as Millais and his circle, but the ODNB's biographies make fascinating reading - even for history's less flamboyant figures.
