Ophelia by John Everett Millais

Ophelia by John Everett Millais

A riverbank painted leaf by leaf

Ophelia lies on her back in the stream, lips parted, palms open, drifting as Queen Gertrude describes her in Hamlet: singing, her clothes spread wide and holding her up a little longer. Around her Millais painted the bank with a botanist’s eye — a willow leaning out over the water, reeds at the left, wild roses tumbling down the right bank, weed in the shallows. The flowers loose on the water follow Shakespeare’s garland and the Victorian language of flowers; the red poppy, which Shakespeare does not mention, stands for sleep and death. A robin sits among the willow branches at the upper left.

Surrey in summer, Gower Street in winter

The two halves of the picture were painted months apart. The landscape came first, painted outdoors on the banks of the Hogsmill River in Surrey through the summer and autumn of 1851, for up to eleven hours a day. The figure was added that winter in Millais’s London studio in Gower Street, where Elizabeth Siddal posed fully dressed in a bath of water warmed by lamps underneath. When the lamps went out unnoticed she caught a severe cold, and her father demanded that Millais pay the doctor’s bills. The picture was shown at the Royal Academy in 1852 to mixed reviews.

Where it hangs

Ophelia is at Tate Britain in London, part of the gift Sir Henry Tate made to the nation in 1894. The canvas measures 76.2 by 111.8 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 7,087-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 47 inches on its longest side.

Sources: Tate Britain, London · Wikidata Q1065493 · Wikimedia Commons