From John Guille Millais, Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais (1899) i, 160, 276–7, 376–7. Millais (1829–96), painter, President of the Royal Academy, created Baronet 1885, was one of the originators of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 1848. Thackeray was among his early admirers, and they became good friends. Lord Redesdale (1837–1916), who several times met Thackeray at the Millais household, ‘when he and I would be the only guests, making up a quartette with the genial, handsome host and his no less handsome wife’, recalls Thackeray’s fondness for Millais: ‘He admired his art, and the great painter’s large, honest, bluff and rough nature, his innocence of all humbug or affectation, which Thackeray loathed above all things, appealed to him. The two were perfectly happy together, so in that studio Thackeray was at his best. And what a best it was!’ — Memories (1915) pp. 208–9. They first met in 1852, when Millais found Thackeray ‘most agreable’.