By Clara Ferreira-Marques

LONDON (Reuters Life!) - John Everett Millais, famous for his painting of Hamlet's drowning sweetheart Ophelia, has long been popular with the crowds, but maligned among connoisseurs as the man who swapped innovation for a soap deal.

An exhibition at London's Tate Britain, however, aims to restore his reputation as one of Britain's most diverse artists, an innovator whose private life shocked contemporaries and whose work ran the gamut from sensual Pre-Raphaelite art to posed portraits of statesmen and, late in life, dramatic landscapes.

The show, which runs to Jan. 13, is the biggest British exhibition dedicated to Millais since 1967, stretching from his early sketches as a child prodigy - he entered the Royal Academy at 11 - to the Scottish paintings of his last years.

"Millais is an artist whose reputation has ebbed and flowed," Stephen Deuchar, director of the Tate Britain, said.

"This exhibition will show he is back in tune with the tastes of the 21st Century."

Highlights of the show's early pieces include the Tate's own "Ophelia", one of the best-known paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood - a movement of which Millais was a founder and which, inspired by Renaissance art before Raphael, sought to achieve "truth to nature".

For "Ophelia", true to the movement's painstaking attention to detail, Millais spent five months sitting on a riverbank to capture the detailed undergrowth.

He later placed his model fully clothed in a bathtub to capture the listless face and sodden dress - leaving 19-year-old Elizabeth Siddall, the future wife of painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with a terrible cold.

"It established Millais as a painter of sentiment and pathos," one of the exhibition's curators, Alison Smith, said. "There were reports of people standing in front of the painting with tears in their eyes."

SCANDAL

That same year, 1851, Millais met the man who was the great inspiration for the Pre-Raphaelite movement - critic John Ruskin - and Ruskin's young and beautiful wife, Effie, whom he later paints as a Jacobite wife in "The Order of Release".

The painting, in 1853, was the start of the scandal of the era for many Victorians - Effie's relationship with Millais and her eventual decision to leave Ruskin, who had never consummated the marriage and refused children, for the artist.

The Tate also includes Millais' scandals on the artistic front. "Christ in the House of his Parents" shocked contemporaries with its realism - Charles Dickens described Christ as "hideous, wry-necked and blubbering."

The show accompanies the drastic change in Millais life after his marriage in 1854, his move away from Pre-Raphaelite detail into Aestheticism and his focus on the family, painting numerous portraits of Effie's sisters and later of his own children and grandchildren.

These include the sentimental portrait of his grandson - "Bubbles" - which was later bought by the Pear's soap company to advertise its products, becoming one of the most reproduced images in advertising.

But the show, showcasing the breadth of Millais' interests, also includes his sweeping historical pieces, Scottish landscapes which hint at the Impressionist movement, and his paintings in the grand tradition, lauding the British Empire.

These include the moving "North-West Passage", a portrait of an old explorer and his daughter, subtitled: "It might be done, and England ought to do it".