Sophy Gray

Sophia Margaret "Sophie" Gray (28 October 1843 – 15 March 1882), later Sophia Margaret Caird, was a Scottish model for her brother-in-law, the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais. She was a younger sister of Euphemia "Effie" Gray, who married Millais in 1855 after the annulment of her marriage to John Ruskin. The spelling of her name was, after around 1861, sometimes "Sophy," but only within the family. In public she was known as Sophie and later in life, after her marriage, as Sophia. From the late 1860s she suffered from a mental illness which seems to have involved a form of anorexia nervosa. In 1873, she married the Scottish entrepreneur James Caird and together they had a daughter. She died in 1882, probably as a result of her anorexia. Background Sophie Gray was born in October 1843 to Sophia Margaret Gray, née Jameson (1808–1894), and George Gray (1798–1877), a Scottish lawyer and businessman. Her maternal grandfather, Andrew Jameson, became Sheriff-substitute of Fife. Effie Gray (1828–1897), known initially to the family as "Phemy," was the first of fifteen children, and Sophie was the tenth—three sisters, one also named Sophia Margaret, predeceased her. Two of her five elder brothers died before her birth and two passed away before she was seven. The family lived at Bowerswell, a house re-built in 1842 near the foot of Kinnoull Hill, south-east of Perth. As a child, Gray frequently visited and stayed with her sister Effie in London with her husband, the critic and artist John Ruskin. To an extent Effie, who was fifteen years older than Sophie, acted as a kind of second mother to her and Effie's other siblings. From a young age Gray was exposed to the increasingly strained circumstances of the Ruskins' unconsummated marriage. In fact, through her increasing presence in the Ruskin household, Gray may, in some respects, have been a convenient chaperone for her elder sister, whose largely independent social life tended to attract comment. According to Effie, Ruskin's manservant, Frederick Crawley, expressed to Gray his concern that other servants might spread gossip "all over Camberwell."