Sophy Gray (Pre-Raphaelite muse)

Sophia Margaret "Sophy" Gray (October 1843 – 15 March 1882), later Sophy Caird, was a Scottish-born model for her brother-in-law, the pre-Raphaelite painter, John Everett Millais. She was the younger sister of Euphemia (Effie) Gray, who married Millais in 1855 after the annulment of her marriage to John Ruskin.

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. The marriage produced one child. She died in 1882, probably as a result of her anorexia.

Sophy Gray was born in October 1843. Her parents were George Gray (1798–1877), a Scottish lawyer and businessman, and Sophia Margaret Gray, née Jameson (1808–1894). Her grandfather, Andrew Jameson, became Sheriff-substitute of Fife. Sophy was the tenth of fifteen children, although five, including three daughters, pre-deceased her. Two of her three elder brothers alive in 1843 died before she was seven. Effie (1828–1897), known initially to the family as Phemy, was the eldest child. The Grays' second daughter, also named Sophia Margaret, died aged six in 1841.

The family lived at Bowerswell, a house near the foot of Kinnoull Hill, above the Scottish city of Perth, that was re-built in 1842. As a child Sophy frequently visited or stayed with Effie, who lived in London after her marriage in 1848 to the critic and artist John Ruskin. To an extent Effie, who was fifteen years older, acted as Sophy's "second mother", while Sophy, at a very young age, was exposed to the increasingly strained circumstances of the Ruskins' unconsummated marriage. In fact, through her increasing presence in the Ruskin household, Sophy 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 Sophy his concern that other servants might spread gossip "all over Camberwell", while Sophy's governess of three years, a French woman named Delphine, appears to have been discharged by the Grays in March 1854 because of Sophy's habit of confiding in her.

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