Ophelia

Ophelia, oil painting that was created in 1851–52 by John Everett Millais and first exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1852. It is regarded as a masterpiece of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Ophelia is one of the most popular Pre-Raphaelite paintings, produced when the youthful enthusiasm of the group was at its peak. The painstaking attention to detail and love of poetic symbolism exhibited in the painting were characteristic traits of the style. Shakespeare was a favourite source of inspiration for all the Pre-Raphaelites. Here, Millais depicts a scene from Hamlet, where Ophelia throws herself in the river and drowns after her father has been killed by her lover.

Shakespeare had emphasized the plight of his deranged heroine by describing how she garlanded herself with a variety of flowers, each of which had appropriate symbolic associations. Millais followed this lead, portraying the blooms with botanical accuracy and adding examples from the Victorian language of flowers. Among others, he included pansies (love in vain), violets (fidelity), nettles (pain), daisies (innocence), pheasant’s eyes (sorrow), forget-me-nots (devotion), and poppies (death). This final association is also suggested by the outline of a skull, formed by the foliage on the right. It refers not only to Ophelia‘s death, but also to the famous graveyard scene which followed it, featuring Hamlet with Yorick’s skull.

Millais’s obsession with accuracy was not limited to the flowers. He spent four months working on the background, at a spot near the Hogsmill River in Surrey, England. The model, too, was obliged to suffer for his art. She was Elizabeth Siddal, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s future wife. For weeks on end, she posed in a bath full of water, heated from below by a number of lamps.