Biography
John Mills (b. Guildford, Surrey 1928 - d. Ventnor, Isle of Wight, UK 2019) was a chemist who won a three-year Nuffield Foundation scholarship in the Scientific Department at the National Gallery from 1951. His best friends were the artist Victor Willing (1928-1988), whom he had known at school, and his scond wife Paula Rego (1935-2022). Through them he knew the artists Francis Bacon and Andrew Vaccari (later known as Vicari), and the model Henrietta Moraes. Later, he worked with Carl Djerassi, best known for developing the oral contraceptive pill, in which Mills had a hand. He returned to the NG in 1961 and became director the Scientific Department in 1984, finally retiring in 1990. Mills was also an aficionado of Turkish carpets organising the Carpets in paintings exhibition at the National Gallery, June - July 1983 and The Eastern Carpet in the Western World, curated by his friend David Sylvester, the art critic, at the Hayward Gallery, also in 1983 as well as later advising the National Trust on just over 1,750 of the carpets in its historic houses in 1990. He published The Organic Chemistry of Museum Objects, with Raymond White, in 1987 and his memoir Which Yet Survive was published in 2017.