John Guille Millais was born on 24 March 1865. He was the fourth son and seventh child of the painter John Everett Millais and Effie Gray, the former wife of John Ruskin. John grew up in London and Perthshire. As a boy, he formed a collection of birds shot around the Perthshire coast of Scotland. This formed the basis of a lifetime collection of around 3,000 specimens that he later housed in a private museum at Horsham. Specimens from the collection were depicted by his father in his painting The Ruling Passion (also known as The Ornithologist). John painted a bird in his father’s painting Dew-Drenched Furze. Millais began his career in the army with the Seaforth Highlanders, but after six years, resigned his commission, to travel the world. He travelled widely in Europe, Africa and North America, explored Canada and Newfoundland and helped map uncharted areas of Alaska. In 1903 he was a founder of the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire. During the Great War, Millais served with Naval Intelligence in Scandinavia. He then wrote a book on his life and hunting exploits in Africa and Scotland. Wanderings and Memories chronicled his passion for big game hunting and also his fondness for Scotland of his childhood. In 1921 he travelled with his son Raoul Millais to the southern Sudan and mapped for the first time large areas of Bahr al Ghazal, an exploit which led to a book on the Upper Nile. Millais was a highly respected ornithologist and bird artist, producing between 1890 and 1914 a series of books on birds and other natural history subjects. In the study of ornithology, he was renowned for his portraiture of wildfowl and game birds, the subjects of his three most famous works: Natural History of British Feeding Ducks; British Diving Ducks and British Game Birds. They rank amongst some of the finest works on wildfowl ever published. Each bird receives individual treatment in text and detailed exact chromolithographs, some of which were produced by his friend the eminent bird artist Archibald Thorburn (1860-1935). Each species is represented by two or three individuals on a plate drawn in attitudes of feeding, resting and courtship. The books are lavish and with just 400 to 600 original editions published, are now prized as examples of a certain type of High Victorian grandeur. Millais’ private wealth allowed him to indulge his passions on a grand scale. His son Raoul spoke of him as an ‘astonishing man and his power of concentration was such that once he took up a subject he never left it until he knew more about it than anyone in the world.’  This tenacity to get a job done to the best of abilities was never better illustrated in his preparations for Mammals of Great Britain and Ireland (1904) when he spent months with the whaling fleet in the Atlantic, in order to study first hand a group of mammals that had hitherto received little attention. The work which appeared in a limited print run in 1904 also contained illustrations and chromolithographs by George Edward Lodge (1860-1954) and Thorburn. Millais also wrote biographies of his father and Frederick Courtney Selous. In addition, there were authoritative works on rhododendrons, azaleas and magnolias and also a number of sculptures of birds including one now owned by the Horsham Museum. Millais settled his family at Horsham in West Sussex. In 1893 he married Frances Skipworth, daughter of a Lincolnshire landowner. Their first daughter Daphne was born in 1895 (she died of appendicitis in 1904), followed by Geoffroy in 1896 (killed in action in the Great War) then Raoul Millais, an artist who lived to be nearly a hundred years of age and finally another daughter, Rosamond in 1904. In 1900 Millais built a house called Compton’s Brow at Horsham, where he created a private museum. The collection assembled included specimens of big-game, deer, waterfowl, bats, seals. He continually created illustrations and painted his wildlife collection. Millais would regularly take off for months at a time to go big game hunting and brought back numerous specimens to add to his vast collection. This continued until well into the 1920s. At Horsham, the author Hillaire Belloc would come to dinner once a month and would sit up to the early hours of the morning drinking large quantities of beer, as the teetotal Millais listened to his extravagant tales. As they both lost sons in the Great War, they had much in common. Millais died at Horsham on 24 March 1931, his 66th birthday.