She had previously married the art critic John Ruskin, but she left him with the marriage never having been consummated; it was subsequently annulled.

Between 1842 and 1844 she attended Avonbank school run by the Misses Byerley near Stratford on Avon, Warwickshire, England, partly as her parents wanted her to lose her Scottish accent.

She was an assiduous student at Avonbank winning prizes in every year but was taken out of school to be a support to her mother when her siblings died of scarlet fever.

This caused her to develop a severe phobia concerning Bowerswell, keeping her from attending her son's wedding to Gray.

In particular, he made a point of drawing the Ca' d'Oro and the Palazzo Ducale (Doge's Palace), because he feared they would soon be destroyed by the occupying Austrian troops.

One of the troops, Lieutenant Charles Paulizza, made friends with Gray, apparently with no objection from Ruskin.

[10]Ruskin confirmed this in his statement to his lawyer during the annulment proceedings: "It may be thought strange that I could abstain from a woman who to most people was so attractive.

She then became close to Millais when he accompanied the couple on a trip to Scotland in order to paint Ruskin's portrait according to the critic's artistic principles.

Gray also modelled for a number of her husband's works, notably Peace Concluded (1856), which idealises her as an icon of beauty and fertility.

In 1885, her husband was elevated to the baronetage by Queen Victoria, having been created Baronet Millais of Palace Gate, in the parish of St Mary Abbot, Kensington, in the county of Middlesex, and of Saint Ouen, in the Island of Jersey.

Her journal indicates her high regard for her husband's art, and his works are still recognisably Pre-Raphaelite in style several years after his marriage.

Millais also used his sister-in-law, Sophie Gray, then in her early teens, as the basis of some striking images in the mid to late 1850s, provoking suggestions of a mutual infatuation.

[23] Eventually, when Millais was dying, the Queen relented through the intervention of her daughter Princess Louise, allowing Gray to attend an official function.

[26] She was buried beside her son George, who died aged 21,[27] in Kinnoull Parish churchyard, Perth, which is depicted in Millais's painting The Vale of Rest.