Ophelia by Millais: The Most Famous Death in Art History (1852)
She floats on her back in a quiet stream, arms open, lips parted, still singing as her dress begins to fill with water. Around her, every leaf, reed and flower is painted with almost scientific precision. John Everett Millais's Ophelia (1851–52) turns the drowning of Shakespeare's heroine into one of the most famous images in British art. It hangs in Tate Britain, London, where it remains one of the museum's best-loved paintings.
Artist: John Everett Millais (1829–1896)
Date: 1851–1852
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 76.2 × 111.8 cm
Collection: Tate Britain, London
Notable fact: Millais spent about five months painting the riverbank outdoors before adding the figure, modelled by Elizabeth Siddal in a bathtub
What scene from Hamlet does it show?
Ophelia's death does not happen on stage in Hamlet. It is reported by Queen Gertrude in Act 4, Scene 7. Driven mad by grief after Hamlet kills her father, Ophelia climbs a willow over a brook to hang garlands of flowers on its branches. A bough breaks and she falls into the water. For a while her spreading clothes hold her up, "mermaid-like", and she sings old songs, "as one incapable of her own distress", until her garments, "heavy with their drink", pull her down "to muddy death".
Millais chooses the moment between these two states: Ophelia is still afloat and still singing, but the end is near. Her open arms and upturned face recall traditional images of saints and martyrs, which gives the scene a strange calm. There is no struggle and no panic, only a slow drift towards death.
Why are there so many flowers?
The flowers are the key to the painting. Some come directly from Shakespeare's description of Ophelia's garland and from her mad scene, where she hands out flowers and names their meanings. Others were added by Millais, following the Victorian fashion for the "language of flowers", in which each plant carried a message. The willow, nettles and daisies along the bank echo Gertrude's speech; the pansies floating on her dress stand for love in vain; the violets around her neck, for faithfulness and early death. The bright red poppy near her hand is not in Shakespeare at all: Millais added it as a symbol of sleep and death.
Seen this way, the riverbank becomes a text. The viewer who knew the language of flowers could read Ophelia's story in the vegetation around her, while anyone else could still enjoy one of the most detailed landscapes ever painted.
Where was it painted?
Following the Pre-Raphaelite belief in truth to nature, Millais painted the landscape outdoors, on the banks of the Hogsmill River in Surrey, near Old Malden, in 1851. He worked there for up to eleven hours a day, six days a week, for about five months, while his friend William Holman Hunt painted nearby. Millais complained in a letter about the "muscular" Surrey flies, the threat of being prosecuted for trespassing on a hayfield and the danger of being blown into the water. As autumn turned to winter, he built a small hut of hurdles covered with straw to shelter in while he worked.
Only when the landscape was finished did he paint the figure, back in his London studio. That two-stage method explains the painting's unusual effect: the background has the intense, even focus of a botanical study, and the figure seems to float in it rather than sit within it.
Who was the model?
Ophelia was modelled by Elizabeth Siddal, then 22, an artist and poet who later married Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Millais had her lie fully clothed in a bathtub filled with water in his studio at 7 Gower Street, heated by oil lamps underneath. During one session the lamps went out without Millais noticing, and Siddal caught a severe cold. Her father demanded £50 from the painter for her medical expenses; according to Millais's son, a lower sum was eventually accepted.
How was it received?
When Ophelia was shown at the Royal Academy in 1852, reactions were mixed. One reviewer in The Times complained that Millais had soused Ophelia "in a weedy ditch", and even John Ruskin, who supported Millais, admired the "exquisite" technique but questioned the choice of an ordinary Surrey riverbank. Over time, opinion changed completely. The painting came to be seen as a masterpiece of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and in the twentieth century Salvador Dalí praised it in the Surrealist journal Minotaure. Its image has been reused in films, album covers and music videos, and it influenced later painters such as John William Waterhouse, whose own tragic heroines you can explore in Waterhouse's Women Who Break the Rule and on our page John William Waterhouse: Every Painting We've Explained.
Another floating heroine of Victorian art, doomed by a story she cannot escape, is Tennyson's Lady of Shalott; see how George Edward Robertson painted her arrival at Camelot, or how Waterhouse set her adrift in The Lady of Shalott.
Why does Ophelia still move us?
Part of the answer is the contrast at the heart of the picture. Everything around Ophelia is intensely alive: the nettles, the reeds, the robin on the willow branch, the flowers opening in the sun. At the centre of all that growth is a young woman quietly dying. Millais does not dramatise the moment. He simply lets nature carry on around her, and that calm is what makes the scene so hard to forget.
Hang Millais’s Ophelia — the floating figure, the flowers and the green riverbank — as a vintage art poster from the Sapiens Verbum print shop.
Get the vintage poster →See the vintage poster collection →License this image →
Get Millais’s Ophelia as a museum-quality print, canvas, or poster from the Sapiens Verbum print shop.
Choose your size and frame →Printed and shipped by Fine Art America · 30-day money-back guarantee
Watch the video essay on @SapiensVerbum on YouTube.
Sources
- Tate: Ophelia, Sir John Everett Millais, 1851–2
- Wikipedia: Ophelia (Millais)
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 7
Comments
Post a Comment