ophelia painting analysis essay

“Ophelia” by John Everett Millais – The Tragic Story of Ophelia

William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c. 1599–1601) was a tale of love, murder, madness, and heartbreak, of which the character Ophelia met her end, drowning in a brook, but is forever immortalized in the visual arts. In this article, we will discuss one of the most famous renditions of her tragic end by pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais.

Table of Contents

• 1 Artist Abstract: Who Was John Everett Millais?
• 2.1.1 Shakespeare, Flowers, and Real Life 
• 3.1 Subject Matter: Visual Description
• 3.3 Texture
• 3.5 Shape and Form
• 4 Ophelia: Death, Beauty, and Botany
• 5.1 Who Made the Famous Ophelia Painting?
• 5.2 What Story Is the Ophelia Painting Based On?
• 5.3 What Does the Ophelia Painting Symbolize?

Artist Abstract: Who Was John Everett Millais?

Sir John Everett Millais was born on June 8, 1829, and died on August 13, 1896. He was one of the leading artists and founders of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood group. He was born in Southampton, Hampshire in England. He was an artist from a young age and was encouraged to paint further when his family moved to London, where he attended the Royal Academy of Arts. His style ranged from portrait paintings to landscapes and he was also commissioned by several important political figures, namely William Ewart Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli. He was also made Baronet in 1885.

He influenced art styles like Art Deco, Art Nouveau , as well as prominent artists like Vincent van Gogh and James Abbot McNeill Whistler.

Ophelia (1851 – 1852) by John Everett Millais in Context

We will start discussing the famous Ophelia (1851–1852) by John Everett Millais with a brief contextual analysis exploring the subject matter based on Hamlet and the artist’s process of creating the composition.

This will be followed by a formal analysis, first discussing the subject matter in greater detail, and then looking at the artist’s techniques according to the seven art elements, color, texture, line, shape, form, and space, respectively. 

Contextual Analysis: A Brief Socio-Historical Overview

When John Everett Millais painted Ophelia around the early 1850s the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was already active. It was started in 1848 by Millais, William Holman Hunt, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood sought to move away from art that was influenced by the High Renaissance, especially the idealistic styles of the famous Italian painter Raphael.

Art styles before or “pre-Raphael” were inspirations, and some of the main artistic characteristics were painting realistically, true to nature, also described as “Naturalism”, and depicting subjects from literature or sometimes the Bible. 

Furthermore, women would often be the main protagonists, and artists would depict them from live models. In the painting Ophelia by John Everett Millais, the woman who modeled was Elizabeth Siddall, who was 19 years old. She modeled for Millais in a bathtub, floating in the water and wearing a thin dress.

John Everett Millais painted from nature at the Hogsmill River in Ewell, Surrey, which is in South East England. He closely studied the natural environment around him, and his painting process started with the outside before he painted the figure of Ophelia’s model inside.

However, he is often quoted from one of his letters written to Mrs. Martha Combe. She and her husband Thomas Combe were both friends as well as promoters of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood art, comparing the conditions as a “greater punishment to a murderer than hanging”. Millais described the flies as more “muscular” in Surrey, that he was “threatened with a notice to appear before a magistrate for trespassing in a field and destroying the hay”, and finally, he also described the danger of being “blown by the wind into the water” and meeting the same fate as that of his protagonist Ophelia.

Painting “Ophelia” was no walk in the park for Millais, and he weathered the elements around him, reportedly from early in the morning to the evening, for around five months, but in the end, he created a composition that was almost photographic.

The Ophelia painting was exhibited in 1852 at the Royal Academy of Arts and received a variety of responses, some criticisms, and some praises, for example, The Morning Chronicle from 1852 described it as “startling in its originality” and a review in The Times newspaper likened Ophelia as a “dairymaid in a frolic”.

Shakespeare, Flowers, and Real Life 

Hamlet was one of William Shakespeare’s most famous plays , the phrase by Hamlet’s character, “to be, or not to be” is emblazoned on the pages of history, but the character known as Ophelia, who turned mad and drowned in a brook, became a popular choice for subject matter throughout the Victorian era, and although she met a tragic end, she was the star of many paintings.

Interestingly, in Shakespeare’s play, Ophelia’s death was not depicted, but described by the character Queen Gertrude when she spoke to Laertes, who was Ophelia’s brother in Act 4, Scene 7.

Queen Gertrude explained how Ophelia tried to climb a willow tree to pick flowers, but she fell into the “weeping brook” when an “envious sliver broke” (a branch); her clothes kept her afloat only for a short while and she sang, “which time she chanted snatches of old tunes” but eventually “her garments, heavy with their drink” caused her to sink down to her “muddy death”.

It is important to note that Ophelia was also closely associated with flowers, and certain flowers held symbolic meanings. There were also several types of flowers mentioned in the play when Queen Gertrude described the natural setting where Ophelia died, explaining: “therewith fantastic garlands did she make of crow flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples”. John Everett Millais depicted some of these flowers in the Ophelia painting, which we will explore in the visual description below, but he also depicted the flowers and foliage from the Hogsmill River and its bank.

It is important to note that the flowers were significant during the Victorian era, holding various symbolic meanings.

Formal Analysis: A Brief Compositional Overview

Below we will look at the visual composition of Ophelia by John Everett Millais, starting with a description of the subject matter and then how the artist created it in terms of color, texture, line, shape, form, and space.

Subject Matter: Visual Description

The Ophelia painting needs to be viewed from far away, to see the entire image, and from up close, to not only see but experience the minute detail. The composition is depicted in a horizontal orientation, and the main protagonist and focal point, Ophelia, is floating in a body of water. Her head is situated to the left of the composition, and her feet face towards the right-hand side.

She is depicted in a beautiful, soft dress barely keeping her buoyant and her midsection is submerged in the water.

Her face is still out of the water, and we can see she has an almost listless expression; her eyes are staring out ahead and her mouth is slightly parted. She appears almost unaware of the fact that she is drowning (“As one incapable of her own distress”), and she is still singing, as per Queen Ophelia’s description of her in Hamlet (Act 4, Scene 7), which was mentioned earlier in the article. 

There is a necklace of purple violets around her neck and a small pink rosebud on its stem near her right ear. Both of Ophelia’s hands are floating just above the water, her palms are facing up and her hands appear cupped.

She is holding several flowers in her right hand (our left) and her left (our right) hand is empty.

There are also several other flowers like a red poppy, daisies, a deep violet/blue cornflower, white jasmine, pansies, marsh marigolds, a cabbage rose, Irises, fritillaries, and more floating down the water’s current, mostly along Ophelia’s right side (our left). 

Lush foliage surrounds the almost drowned figure of Ophelia. To the left of the composition is a large tree stump of a weeping willow with various branches and stinging nettle growing around it. In the top left corner, atop one of the thin branches, is a robin.

The robin bird holds significant symbolism, including rebirth and death.

To the right of the composition is more greenery and an assortment of plants. There is a briar rose bush with white blooms more towards the middle background, and to its left (our right) are either the teasel flowering plant or meadowsweet flowers.

In the top right corner is another plant with purple flowers, which could possibly be the “purple loosestrife”, and directly below it are forget-me-nots on the embankment.

In the foreground, in the bottom left corner, is a plant with vertical strips of leaves (referred to as “monocot” leaves), possibly the greater pond sedge, and just in front of it – in the near foreground – are forget-me-not flowers.

Towards the middle foreground is a mossy/algae patch with small white flowers growing from it, which could be “stream water crowfoot”.

The dominant colors in Ophelia by John Everett Millais are varieties of greens, however, Millais utilized different yellows, blues, whites, and blacks. He utilized a “lush” mixture of hues to create the tonal contrasts of color, especially between the darker shadier parts of the foliage and the lighter parts illuminated by natural light. There are also other colors from the various flowers, providing more variety as well as enhancing the subject matter and symbolic meanings.

Furthermore, Ophelia’s skin tone is depicted as fair and light, contrasted against the deep dark colors of the water below her.

John Everett Millais painted so close to nature that you would think the Ophelia painting is a photograph. As rich as it is in the foliage and flowers of the natural landscape, so too is it in implied texture, which gives the illusion of the tactile appearance of the subject matter.

For example, the monocot leaves from the sedge plant in the bottom left foreground. Notice the broken tip of one of the leaves and the overall smoothness, upright firmness, yet soft flexibility.

There is a diversity of lines in Ophelia by John Everett Millais, from the vertical lines created by the Sedge plant in the lower left foreground to the diagonal lines from the various branches and twigs of the willow tree to the left, including the tree stump.

The orientation of the composition itself is landscape, which creates an overall horizontal linearity, emphasized by Ophelia’s placement in the scene; her body and the part of the stream she floats in both create a horizontal band running through the center of the canvas.

Shape and Form

The Ophelia painting depicts organic shapes and forms that are found in nature versus geometric shapes and forms. These include a variety, from the diamond-like and oval shapes of the leaves to the circular and patterned shapes of the flowers. Additionally, there is also the long rectangular shape created by the horizontal body of water, while the willow tree stump has a seemingly rounded rectangular shape as it juts out from the foliage and above the water.

However, these shapes are not distinctively outlined or geometric; instead, they blend into the natural environment.

Space as an element of art refers to the “area” utilized in the composition as well as the level of three-dimensionality or depth to create perspective. This can also be conveyed through various other elements like color, shapes, and the scale of objects, as well as how much detail is depicted, which is noticeable in Millais’s Ophelia painting. In the Ophelia painting, the vegetation in the foreground and background creates a framing effect, which places our, the viewers, attention on Ophelia in the center.

Furthermore, the background of the composition acts almost as a backdrop of fauna and flora, which brings Ophelia’s figure closer into our space, also making the picture space shallower.

Ophelia: Death, Beauty, and Botany

Ophelia by John Everett Millais has invited many a discourse, from feminism and how women are depicted in art, their role in a patriarchal society, and Ophelia herself as the subject for many paintings during the 19 th century, to the Victorian era’s penchant for flowers, their significance, and symbolic meanings.

Alongside its appearances in pop culture like film, television, and music, the “Ophelia” painting has influenced modern artists like the Surrealist Salvador Dalí, who also produced an iteration of the scene titled “Ophelia’s Death” (1973). The “Ophelia” painting has been a botanist’s beacon for identifying flowers and plants as well as a tale of death and how Ophelia met her demise surrounded by the ever-beautiful bouquets of flowers.

Take a look at our Ophelia painting webstory here!

Frequently Asked Questions

Who made the famous ophelia painting.

The famous Ophelia (1851–1852) oil-on-canvas was painted by John Everett Millais, who was part of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood art group, and one of its founders. The painting depicts the moment Ophelia is about to drown, surrounded by a myriad of flowers symbolizing aspects of what she experienced, from life and love to death.

What Story Is the Ophelia Painting Based On?

Ophelia (1851–1852), painted by John Everett Millais, was based on the character from William Shakespeare’s famous play Hamlet (c. 1599–1601). It depicts the scene of Ophelia’s death described by Queen Gertrude in Act 4, Scene 7.

What Does the Ophelia Painting Symbolize?

The painting Ophelia (1851–1852) by John Everett Millais explores several themes, from death, love, life, madness, and nature. There are numerous flowers depicted and each holds symbolic meanings that relate to the themes of the story, which is based on the play Hamlet (c. 1599–1601) by William Shakespeare .

Alicia du Plessis is a multidisciplinary writer. She completed her Bachelor of Arts degree, majoring in Art History and Classical Civilization, as well as two Honors, namely, in Art History and Education and Development, at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. For her main Honors project in Art History, she explored perceptions of the San Bushmen’s identity and the concept of the “Other”. She has also looked at the use of photography in art and how it has been used to portray people’s lives.

Alicia’s other areas of interest in Art History include the process of writing about Art History and how to analyze paintings. Some of her favorite art movements include Impressionism and German Expressionism. She is yet to complete her Masters in Art History (she would like to do this abroad in Europe) having given it some time to first develop more professional experience with the interest to one day lecture it too.

Alicia has been working for artincontext.com since 2021 as an author and art history expert. She has specialized in painting analysis and is covering most of our painting analysis.

Learn more about Alicia du Plessis and the Art in Context Team .

Cite this Article

Alicia, du Plessis, ““Ophelia” by John Everett Millais – The Tragic Story of Ophelia.” Art in Context. October 8, 2022. URL: https://artincontext.org/ophelia-by-john-everett-millais/

du Plessis, A. (2022, 8 October). “Ophelia” by John Everett Millais – The Tragic Story of Ophelia. Art in Context. https://artincontext.org/ophelia-by-john-everett-millais/

du Plessis, Alicia. ““Ophelia” by John Everett Millais – The Tragic Story of Ophelia.” Art in Context , October 8, 2022. https://artincontext.org/ophelia-by-john-everett-millais/ .

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A Closer Look at Ophelia by John Everett Millais

In this post, I take a closer look at the remarkably intricate  Ophelia by British artist and founding member of the Pre-Raphaelites, Sir John Everett Millais. I cover:

Key Facts, Ideas, and Subject

Intricate detail, color and light, composition, key takeaways, want to learn more, thanks for reading.

• The figure in the painting is Ophelia, a character from Shakespeare’s Hamlet , Act IV, Scene VII. She is depicted lying in the stream singing, just before she drowns. Below is an extract from the play which poetically describes her death:

“There is a willow grows aslant a brook, That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream; There with fantastic garlands did she come Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them: There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke; When down her weedy trophies and herself Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide; And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up: Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes; As one incapable of her own distress, Or like a creature native and indued Unto that element: but long it could not be Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay To muddy death.”

• In plain words, she climbed a willow tree to gather exotic flowers. The branch broke and she fell into the “weeping brook” (small river). Her garments “spread wide and mermaid-like” kept her afloat at first from the air trapped underneath. But, she was eventually pulled down by her garments, “heavy with their drink… to her muddy death”.
• The painting was first exhibited in 1852 at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. It received a mixed reception, with many critics praising his technique yet questioning the subject matter. One critic wrote in The Times, “there must be something strangely perverse in an imagination which souses Ophelia in a weedy ditch and robs the drowning struggle of that lovelorn maiden of all pathos and beauty”.
• It was painted in two separate stages: first for the landscape and second for Ophelia. Millais and the Pre-Raphaelites placed considerable importance on the landscape, which explains the remarkably intricate detail used for the background area in this painting.
• He started painting the landscape part in July 1851. Instead of painting from the comforts of his studio, he immersed himself in nature and painted on location. But this did not go without its challenges, as he wrote:

“The flies of Surrey are more muscular, and have a still greater propensity for probing human flesh. I am threatened with a notice to appear before a magistrate for trespassing in a field and destroying the hay … and am also in danger of being blown by the wind into the water. Certainly the painting of a picture under such circumstances would be greater punishment to a murderer than hanging.”

• He reportedly painted the landscape for up to 11 hours a day, six days a week, over five months in 1851.
• Due to poor weather conditions, Millais ended up having a small hut created later that year which was “made of four hurdles, like a sentry-box, covered outside with straw”. Fellow Pre-Raphaelite, William Holman Hunt , was impressed by the hut and had a similar one built for himself.
• Ophelia was modeled by Elizabeth Siddal, who was 19 years old at the time. Millais dressed her in a silver embroidered dress which he purchased from an antique shop for four pounds. He wrote to Thomas Combe in March 1852 about the dress, “Today I have purchased a really splendid lady’s ancient dress – all flowered over in silver embroidery – and I am going to paint it for “Ophelia”. You may imagine it is something rather good when I tell you it cost me, old and dirty as it is, four pounds”.
• Below is a self-portrait by Siddal completed after she modeled as Ophelia:

• Millais had Siddal lay in a bathtub filled with water at his studio in London as he completed the second part of the painting over four months. Below is one of his studies of her face:

• Millais originally included a small water rat in the painting, but it was met with confusion: “Hunt’s uncle and aunt came, both of whom understood most gratifyingly every object except my water rat. The male relation, when invited to guess at it, eagerly pronounced it to be a hare. Perceiving by our smiles that he had made a mistake, a rabbit was then hazarded. After which I have a faint recollection of a dog or a cat being mentioned.” Millais ended up painting over the water rat.
• The painting influenced many artists, such as Salvador Dalí, who wrote in 1936, “How could Salvador Dalí fail to be dazzled by the flagrant surrealism of English Pre-Raphaelitism? The Pre-Raphaelite painters bring us radiant women who are, at the same time, the most desirable and most frightening that exist.” He also created his own rendition of  Ophelia , shown here .
• The painting is currently held at Tate Britain for those who wish to see the intricate detail in person.

The first thing which comes to mind when I see this painting is the remarkably intricate detail. The whole painting is carefully rendered, even the trees, flowers, and plants in the background.

Below are some close-ups to give you a better idea of the virtuosity of this work. In the first image of Ophelia, notice the subtle white outline surrounding her hand, indicating the presence of water. Small touches like this can go a long way in depicting realism.

In the leaves, notice how they are carefully rendered in light, but get gradually more vague as they recede into shadow. This creates a strong sense of depth.

The area below is particularly sophisticated, with a branch and leaves shooting out into the sunlight, creating an interesting contrast between light and shadow; or delicate and vague.

The plants below would have been challenging to paint, with the awkward shapes and complex shadow arrangements.

The painting features rich colors of nature against the soft, skin tones of Ophelia. The saturated greens give a feel of the luscious, unkempt nature.

In terms of color temperature , the lights appear slightly warm compared to the darks. This is particularly evident in the greens: notice how the greens in shadow are much closer to blue than the greens in light.

Throughout the dense landscape are small bursts of light and color to depict the exotic flowers. As mentioned earlier in the post, Ophelia was collecting these exotic flowers before she fell into the stream.

The colors used for Ophelia are soft and weak. She appears relatively fragile as she lay in the stream, before her “muddy death”. Light colors are used for the subject’s face and hands, drawing your attention towards this area. You can see how much lighter the subject’s face is compared to the surrounding landscape in the grayscale image below:

The composition is rather simple if you look past all the intricate detail. It boils down to Ophelia laying in the river, surrounded by nature.

Ophelia’s face is partially framed by nature, with the top of the frame being the brown tree trunk and branches, the left of the frame being the plants shooting up from the stream, and the bottom of the frame being the green edge of the shore.

In the photo below, I have segmented the painting into thirds both horizontally and vertically. Notice how Ophelia is positioned almost directly along that lower horizontal line and how her torso is positioned around the bottom-left intersection. These are considered to be aesthetically pleasing areas in a painting.

Finally, you may have noticed the unusual shape of the painting, with the top corners being curved. Though I was unable to find any information on why Millais opted for this shape.

Here are some of the key takeaways from this painting:

• Intricate paintings like this are not created overnight; they take weeks, months, or sometimes even years to create.
• Traditionally in portrait painting, the background is pushed back and simplified. But there are no rules against painting the background with just as much detail as the main figure like Millais did in Ophelia. Just make sure there is something to differentiate the figure from the background. In this case, Millais used contrast in value: the figure’s face and hands are much lighter than the surrounding nature.
• Painting from life allows you to see all the subtle nuances which can get lost in a photo. The remarkable intricacy of  Ophelia suggests it was painted in a controlled studio environment, but Millais preferred to paint on location.
• If you segment the composition into thirds both ways, the intersecting lines are considered to be aesthetically pleasing areas to position your focal points.

You might be interested in my  Painting Academy  course. I’ll walk you through the time-tested fundamentals of painting. It’s perfect for absolute beginner to intermediate painters.

I appreciate you taking the time to read this post and I hope you found it helpful. Feel free to share it with friends.

Happy painting!

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Dan Scott is the founder of Draw Paint Academy. He's a self-taught artist from Australia with a particular interest in landscape painting. Draw Paint Academy is run by Dan and his wife, Chontele, with the aim of helping you get the most out of the art life. You can read more on the About page .

39 comments on “A Closer Look at Ophelia by John Everett Millais”

I have seen this painting in the Tate Gallery ..Absolutely stunning .. I love this period of painters … You may be interested to look at Frederick Leighton …His house in Kensington, London UK is utterly splendid complete With his studio ..It is a work of art and design ….. worth a visit .. I love his paintings too! Thanks for sharing all you observations and tips ..helps me enormously Best Shirley

Thank you for this article Dan and your insights into this wonderfully evocative painting

I do agree… Millais painting is stunning so well put together, so romantic with a detail you recall in your minds eye. I remember seeing at the Tate years ago. I must visit it again…

Some years ago I saw an exhibition of Millais at the Tate in London, it left me with a feeling I had seen something very special,this gets reminded by the book of his works purchased at that visit. Your analysis makes it even more special, thank you Hazel

Beautiful! Thank You for sharing your knowledge.

Amazing how patient he was in the effort to create such a beautiful work of art. I get frustrated with trying to create a painting in 1 to 2 days.

This is a amazing picture. I find that I try to paint in detail too. This is a really reminds that time is needed for beautiful paintings. I get frustrated when it takes so long to paint one part of my picture just right. But then when I finish I am very proud on what I have learned.

Hi Dan Your comments and analysis of the painting was very interesting. I’m not sure I would ever have the patience to paint a picture that takes that long !!!

I found the segmenting of the painting helpful. Always grateful for your insight as a new painter.

Thank you for this article and especially the close-up shots. I don’t have words for such genius.

Dan I must thank you for sharing all your thoughts and knowledge with us, I have always loved this painting but now look at it in a new light

How I interesting this was! It makes me realize my shortcomings. Thank you!

Thanks for your very enlightening analysis of the wonderful paintings. Don’t know how I found your web site but glad I did !

Enlightening on so many levels. Love the painting. Thank you for sharing your knowledge.

I was inspired by Wm. Blake’s man on a knee. I would like to copy it and put it over my bed. Sleep is heavenly is as the assignments you share. Thank you!

What a beautiful painting.! Your analysis is extremely interesting to me. The close-up photographs make the details shine. Thank you for your detailed description. I do hope I will have the opportunity to see this painting someday in a gallery. I benefit so much from your articles. Thank you for this, Dan

Thank you for sharing, very interesting.

That you give us the benefit of your eye and experience restores faith in the world of art.

Thank you. I enjoyed this and look forward to more posts from you.

I value your analysis of this painting. It serves as another lesson in the appreciation of great paintings as well as introducing me to yet, another great painter. Thanks for sharing. I look forward to each of your posts.

Thanks, Dan! I can appreciate the artist’s work, the Inspiration, perspiration and perseverance and skillful rendering of this morbid painting a lot more now.

In 1976 I did an extensive college presentation on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. My professor asked to keep all my work. It was a labor of love. Thank you for sharing one of my favs and information I did not know.

Dan, As usual your explanations are insightful, clear and helpful. I would be interested to know your perspective on the strategy or techniques Millais would have used to paint outdoors for months, and long daily durations. Cloudy days vs sunny days; shadows, textures and contrasts that change hourly and daily with the movement of sunlight and its shadows; the varying lights of changing seasons; no photography to capture “moments”. Where do you surmise Millais’ focus was? Thanks and Cheers, David

Thank you for sharing this remarkable and beautiful painting. And yes!!! I learn something new from your newsletters ever week. John Mallais was an amazing man and painter, someone new on my list to research.

Great question. There was not much information on this so I can only speculate. I assume what he may have done is pick a direction with the painting then wait for certain times when the environment matched his vision. Or, he worked from what was in his head and used the surroundings mainly for inspiration. Whatever the case, it is a remarkable feat of craftsmanship! Thanks, Dan

Nice, Dan. I enjoyed reading this. Funny…it slowed me down to a crawl.

when reading I was completely emerged and seemed to be on the banks with mosquitos flies and the rough environment of our ever changing weather conditions thank you

What inspiring and valuable observations. Thank you so much!

These breakdowns of artist’s work is invaluable to someone like me. I know it is highly unlikely I would ever come close to this skill shown here but each point is a reminder of what to aim for in my own art. Thank you again.

I have always loved this painting, and do appreciate your showing it here, along with the Shekespearean lines! However, I do wish that you could properly use the corect word “lying” instead of the incorrect “laying” in your first sentence!

Thanks for giving information about Ophelia painting.

Fabulous story to accompany the painting and to better understand the process of a painter.

Amazing picture! Thank you for your effort

II am wondering what the actual dimensions are of this stunning work.

Hi Colleen. It is very large. 76 cm x 1.12 m. Thanks! Dan

Perhaps the round corners at the top of the canvas are symbolic of death and the painting is a tombstone.

Fascinating detail in the painting and what you have published. I believe Elizabeth Siddal suffered as a result of having to lie in a bath of water which got cold. But she survived and Millais’s painting is a masterpiece.

That was truly very interesting. I had never heard of John Everett Millais, or this painting, Ophelia. Amazing detail throughout the painting. Thank u for sharing this with us. Very informative.

I’m not an art major, but here’s my theory on why the painting is shaped as it is. Millais was part of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of artists whose style emulated late medieval and early Renaissance art.

During that time, arched painting frame designs were used to harmonize with architectural elements including doors and windows. In cathedrals, frescos and murals were painted on the arched entrances and apses.

My final thought is that Millais used this shape as a window or gateway to gaze upon the scene of Ophelia in her moment of death.

Thank you. I’ve been looking for an answer to this question. A few of his paintings have this curved top.

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• The Meaning Of Ophelia By...

The Meaning Of 'Ophelia' By John Everett Millais

In 1894, the Tate Gallery received into its collection an oil-on-canvas painted by a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), John Everett Millais. Titled Ophelia , it depicted the aftermath of the Shakespearean heroine’s suicide in Hamlet. A morbid scene but a popular one at the time, under Millais’ brush this painting contained no violence – only an ethereally harrowing tone. Although Ophelia was an early Pre-Raphaelite work – a work opposing the lauded Renaissance artist Raphael and his influential elegance – it exemplifies much of what the PRB initially stood for: high detail, close attention to nature, abundant colour, and non-simplistic composition, with subjects frequently stemming from the Romantic, the medieval, and the literary. Shakespeare was highly popular in the Victorian age, and the dramatic death of Ophelia, who purposefully let herself drown following her father’s murder at the hands of her lover Hamlet, frequently appeared as the subject of many pieces of art at this time. The PRB did not shy from scenes which were emotionally or morally challenging, with death frequently entering their subject choices. In the Tate collection alone, Ophelia is joined in Pre-Raphaelite scenes of death by Henry Wallis’ The Death of Chatterton , and, sailing to her death, John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott .

Today Ophelia is on display in Room 1840 at Tate Britain and receives much visitor attention, due in no small part to the superbly intricate brushwork, and disbelievingly heartbroken expression still visible on Ophelia’s young, pale, lifeless face, lips still parted from the snatches of song she sang as she died. Her body seems to hang suspended in the water, mostly submerged with only her face, neck, breasts and hands breaking the water’s surface, along with a few skirt folds of her highly ornate dress. Her auburn hair drifting in the water around her head seems to emphasise her lost youth while her hands are submissively turned palm up, just peeping out of the surface of the water. The overall impression is of exhausted defeat: she has not fought her death but welcomed it, as her surrendering hands and unrestrained limbs show.

Ophelia’s recently extinguished life makes a disturbing contrast to the lushness which surrounds her. Although the multitude of coloured flowers may seem present only to add highlights of colour to the scene, in actual fact Millais injected high intelligence into this work by purposefully sourcing symbolic flowers – all of which were painstakingly mimicked in paint to be botanically correct. Roses link to Ophelia’s nickname from her brother – ‘rose of May’ – while forsaken love, pain and innocence are shown by the willows, nettles and daisies. Pansies are symbolically similar, demonstrating love in vain, while the chain of violets around Ophelia’s neck refer to faithfulness and chastity, as well as death – a meaning tripled by the presence of poppies and forget-me-nots.

To perfectly capture the effect of Ophelia’s long hair and full-length, white and silver-gold brocade gown under the water, Millais employed a young woman named Elizabeth Siddal to lie in a bathtub and act as his model for the body of Ophelia. This lasted a period of four months, over which he painted Siddal’s waterlogged figure into his already completed landscape; although, the partnership nearly ended in horror when on one occasion, the lamps keeping the bathwater warm went out, leading to the uncomplaining Siddal becoming severely ill and near death. Her father threatened to take Millais to court, until – most likely with more than a little guilt at his inobservance – the artist paid his model’s medical bills. Perhaps the fact that Siddal would develop into an artist herself was what stopped her interrupting Millais’ focus: she recognised his absorption in his work, and the value of creative focus.

As beautiful as the result was of placing Siddal before Millais’ canvas, it was to Dante Gabriel Rossetti that this pale-skinned, copper-haired young woman became an especial muse and, in 1860, his bride. This was despite many turbulent years preceding their wedding day – including Rossetti’s infidelity, and frequent abandoning of both his promises of marriage and his often sickly wife. There is a tragic irony between the life of Ophelia and of Elizabeth Siddal: both grief-stricken, medically depressed women took their own lives, unable to live with the grief of losing loved ones. For in February 1862, suffering from post-partum depression following the stillbirth of her daughter, and addicted to opium, the always prone to melancholy Siddal took a high dose of laudanum – whether intentionally or accidentally – and died several days later.

Therefore, Millais’ Ophelia, a painting of a prone young woman, alone and blank-faced, seems almost like a premonition once the viewer is aware of what happened to the model. Because of Siddal’s famed status it is difficult to separate her from Ophelia despite knowing where the line should be drawn. Anybody standing in Room 1840 of Tate Britain may read Ophelia on the descriptive note attached to the work; yet there is no doubt that the otherworldly scene takes on a poignancy once the presence of Siddal and her story has been identified and associated with the work. It has become over time a painting of two women rather than one, in a picturesque yet grief-stricken scene, which also demonstrtes the talent of the artist, and his ability to wield a brush in such a way that light, textures, and natural details are precisely captured in paint. A multifaceted piece of art if ever there was one.

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Europe 1800 - 1900

Course: europe 1800 - 1900   >   unit 4.

• A Beginner's Guide to the Pre-Raphaelites
• The Aesthetic Movement
• Pre-Raphaelites: Curator's choice - Millais's Isabella
• Sir John Everett Millais, Isabella
• Sir John Everett Millais, Christ in the House of His Parents

Sir John Everett Millais, Ophelia

• Millais, Ophelia
• Millais, Mariana
• Millais, Portrait of John Ruskin
• A Portrait of John Ruskin and Masculine Ideals of Dress in the Nineteenth Century
• Sir John Everett Millais, Spring (Apple Blossoms)
• Millais, The Vale of Rest
• John Everett Millais, Bubbles
• Hunt, Claudio and Isabella
• Hunt, Our English Coasts ("Strayed Sheep")
• Hunt, Our English Coasts
• Hunt, the Awakening Conscience
• Hunt, The Awakening Conscience
• William Holman Hunt, Isabella or the Pot of Basil
• William Holman Hunt, The Lady of Shalott
• William Holman Hunt, The Shadow of Death
• William Holman Hunt, The Scapegoat
• Ford Madox Brown, Work
• Ford Madox Brown, The Last of England
• Pre-Raphaelites: Curator's choice - Ford Madox Brown's 'Work'
• Rossetti, Ecce Ancilla Domini
• Rossetti, Beata Beatrix
• Rossetti, Proserpine
• Wallis, Chatterton
• William Powell Frith, Derby Day
• Dyce's Pegwell Bay, Kent - a Recollection of October 5th, 1858
• Dyce, Pegwell Bay, Kent - a Recollection of October 5th, 1858
• Emily Mary Osborn, Nameless and Friendless
• John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, Thoughts of the Past
• Burne-Jones, The Golden Stairs
• Burne-Jones, King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid
• Sleeping Beauty — but without the Kiss: Burne-Jones and the Briar Rose series
• Burne-Jones, The Depths of the Sea
• Burne-Jones, Hope
• Sir Edward Burne-Jones, four stained glass windows at Birmingham Cathedral
• Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott
• William Butterfield, All Saints, Margaret Street
• William Morris, The Green Dining Room
• William Morris and Philip Webb, Red House
• Pre-Raphaelites

A Pre-Raphaelite Masterpiece

The hazards of painting outdoors.

“I sit tailor-fashion under an umbrella throwing a shadow scarcely larger than a halfpenny for eleven hours, with a child’s mug within reach to satisfy my thirst from the running stream beside me. I am threatened with a notice to appear before a magistrate for trespassing in a field and destroying the hay.”

The Hazards of being an Artist's Model

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How ophelia is represented in nineteenth-century english art.

Rachel Stewart

John William Waterhouse, Untitled [Ophelia], 1910.

In Victorian England, artists painted an abundance of portraits of Ophelia; many of them perhaps inspired by one of the most famous paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, John Everett Millais’s 1850s depiction of Ophelia. This selective chronological review shows the evolution of artistic ideas about the well-known character from Shakespeare’s Hamlet as each of the following paintings presents a freeze-frame of one single moment from Ophelia’s life or death in which she must be observed and analyzed based solely on her physical appearance and the appearance of her surroundings.

Richard Redgrave, Ophelia Weaving Her Garlands , 1842. ©Victoria and Albert Museum

In Richard Redgrave’s 1842 painting, Ophelia and her flowers provide the only strong colors in an otherwise dull, brown landscape. The white and gold clothes resemble her purity and innocence. The red in the water resembles blood, a colour physically connected to Ophelia as red poppies drop from her lap and into the water. Poppies were considered a highly symbolic flower in England in the 1840s because, in the early nineteenth century, scarlet corn poppies grew over the battlefields from the Napoleonic Wars. As a consequence of this, red poppies became a symbol of death. The roving eyes of Redgrave’s Ophelia also give her a sense of restlessness.

By far the most well-known painting of Ophelia is John Everett Millais’ 1852 depiction of a moment shortly before her death. Millais’s fellow Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt wrote about the purpose of Pre-Raphaelite art, opining of the artworks that preceded it that ‘their most frequent offence in my eyes was the substitution of inane prettiness for beauty […] Pictured waxworks playing the part of human beings provoked me […] What I sought was the power of undying appeal to the hearts of living men. Much of the favourite art left the inner self untouched’.

John Everett Millais, Ophelia , c.1852. Photo: © Tate, London, 2017.

Distress is most visible in the face of Millais’s Ophelia, of all the paintings in this collection, reflecting Hunt’s words about the focus on the inner self in Pre-Raphaelite art. This is partly because Millais’s extreme detail and very precise brush strokes allow for greater photorealism in his paintings than in those of most of his contemporaries. The vivid color also seems celebratory, with Ophelia’s surroundings appearing either ignorant of her death or unfeeling towards her. The darkness in this painting comes from the black water, which seems to be swallowing her as well as dragging the colorful flowers out of her hands; Millais shows us bright color drawn away from her as she is consumed by this darkness.

Arthur Hughes, Untitled [Ophelia] , 1852. ©Manchester Art Gallery

Thomas Francis Dicksee, Ophelia , 1873.

Within portraits of Ophelia created after Millais’s painting, it is easy to notice other artists looking to Millais for inspiration. Thomas Francis Dicksee’s Ophelia has the long red hair of the Pre-Raphaelite muses, crowned with colorful flowers. In Dicksee’s painting, Ophelia has removed her crown of wildflowers, she sits on a part of the riverbank covered in dead vegetation, again in a white dress, the bottom of which has already begun to be soiled by the muddy water. The contact between her dress and the water hints at what is to come as the river seems to be clutching at her clothes. The slight reflection of Ophelia suggests that, were she to look down, she would see a ghostly image of herself in the water already.

John William Waterhouse’s vividly colorful paintings of Ophelia were also inspired by the beautiful women of Pre-Raphaelite art. The wide, scared eyes of Ophelia in Waterhouse’s 1910 painting particularly demonstrate that, like Millais, Waterhouse was concerned with creating a visual image that reflects the workings of Ophelia’s mind rather than the ‘inane prettiness’ that Hunt accused earlier nineteenth-century artists of depicting. In both of these Waterhouse paintings, Ophelia is not in the water and is looking away from the river. In both paintings, as well as in Waterhouse’s earlier 1889 painting of Ophelia lying contently in a field, her life does not appear to be in danger. This is enhanced in Waterhouse’s 1910 painting as Ophelia is not alone: a person watches her from a raised platform or bridge.

John William Waterhouse, Untitled [Ophelia] , 1889.

In most of these paintings, Ophelia wears a blue or white dress; these are iconic colors of innocence and virginity. White is the traditional color of a bride’s wedding dress and blue is the most common color worn by the Virgin Mary in art, a tradition which dates back to the fifth century AD. The water in all of these paintings is black, the color of darkness and nothingness; brown, the color of a grave; and red, the color of blood. Generally, these paintings capture only a limited, subtle sense of an active threat to Ophelia’s life, focusing instead on her innocence and drawing on the beautiful and poetic description that Gertrude gives of her death. The Ophelias painted by Dicksee and Waterhouse look directly out to their observers, seemingly aware that they are being watched and perhaps inviting observation.

The medium of fine art places all of these Ophelias as objects for observation and these observations focus primarily on her youth, beauty, and innocence. This raises the question of whether such focuses emphasize or override the tragedy of her wasted life. Much of the tragedy within these paintings exists in the knowledge that these images take place moments before her death, something to which these artists allude in their paintings but, with the exception of Millais, do not directly address. Implications of Ophelia’s imminent death include bright flowers falling from her hands and the dark and threatening water grabbing at the edges of her dress. In a manner that reflects the Pre-Raphaelite influence on late nineteenth-century English art, these artists searched for various ways to paint the beauty of Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s death while also finding a visual connection between the physical appearance and the mind of Ophelia, placing her life, youth, and beauty in opposition to her death. Although these paintings may seem to show Ophelia’s death as purely romantic and beautiful on first appearance, the subtler indications of danger, tragedy, and fear are plentiful.

is studying at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, where she recently submitted her PhD on the performance history of madness in Hamlet . She also holds an MA in Shakespeare and Theatre from The Shakespeare Institute. — View all posts by Rachel Stewart

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The Real Ophelia

The Story of Ophelia

• despair (209)
• singing (77)
• picking flowers (28)
• Ophelia (10)
• ‘Hamlet’ (15)
• dress (381)
• floating (36)
• hand / hands raised (143)
• woman (9,110)
• drowned (55)
• mental illness (261)
• Siddal, Elizabeth Eleanor (12)
• individuals: female (1,698)
• Surrey (333)
• England (19,202)
• England, South East (5,940)
• England, Southern (8,982)
• River Hogsmill (1)
• death (685)
• thought - pansy (1)
• death - poppy (3)
• faithfulness - violet (1)
• innocence - daisy (1)
• love, foresaken - willow (1)
• love, in vain - pansy (1)
• memory - forget-me-not (1)
• pain - nettle (1)
• sorrow - fritillary (1)
• sorrow - pheasant’s eye flower (1)
• uselessness - meadowsweet (1)
• courtier (69)

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Tracing Ophelia from Millais to Contemporary Art: Literary, Pictorial and Digital Icons

Depuis les années 1980, décennie au cours de laquelle la critique féministe a véritablement acquis ses lettres de noblesse, Ophélie , tableau emblématique du peintre préraphaélite John Everett Millais (1851-1852) n’a cessé d’être interprété comme un manifeste dénonçant la tyrannie d’une société patriarcale au sein de laquelle la femme semble n’avoir d’autre choix que de se conformer aux exigences masculines, se trouvant réduite au rôle de femme-objet. Parallèlement, les recherches portant sur le personnage d’Ophélie chez Shakespeare ont montré les contradictions inhérentes à sa nature et révélé un paradoxe : alors que dans les productions shakespeariennes, son rôle fut souvent interprété par des chanteurs, sa présence n’a cessé de croître à travers d’autres formes d’art (la musique, la peinture, le cinéma). Point de départ de cet article, le tableau de Millais est ici envisagé à travers ces différentes reprises comme modèle, miroir et repoussoir d’une féminité non pas flottante, mais fluctuante.

Since the 1980s, John Everett Millais’s emblematic oil painting, Ophelia (1851–1852) has been remarkably framed by feminist discourses on gender that convincingly demonstrated how the representation of female death could be linked to patriarchal tradition whose underlying discourse was to tame, control and ultimately objectify women. More recently, further investigation of the Shakespearean character as it resurfaced in literature, film and cinema has brought to light the inherent contradictions relating to her very nature: the more Ophelia is represented and made visible in literature and the arts, the more she seems to be vanishing. Starting with the emblematic Pre-Raphaelite painting, this article aims to establish a critical dialogue between works of various periods and various media, ranging from the Victorian era to the present day to demonstrate the mutations and persistence of Millais’s icon.

Entrées d’index

Mots-clés : , keywords: , texte intégral.

‘As one incapable of her own distress, Or like a creature native and indued Unto that element’ (Shakespeare, Act IV, sc. 7)

• 1 To access the painting, click here: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/millais-ophelia-n01506 . Ac (...)

1 Since its first exhibition, John Everett Millais’s oil painting, Ophelia  (1851–1852), 1 has attracted wide critical attention and generated a countless number of texts and images that have attempted to firmly ground the female figure in an established frame and locate her in a recognizable site both geographically and ideologically. And yet, in spite of all the critical reading frames applied to it, the picture retains its status as a truly iconic image as defined by cultural historian Martin Kemp:

An iconic image is one that has achieved wholly exceptional levels of widespread recognisability and has come to carry a rich series of varied associations for very large numbers of people across time and cultures, such that it has to a greater or lesser degree transgressed the parameters of its initial making, function, context, and meaning. (Kemp 3)

2 The word ‘transgress’ calls for attention here and suggests transformation, progress and subversion as well as the crossing over of disciplines and media boundaries.

3 How has Millais’s Ophelia come to transcend the historical frame of its Victorian setting and come to epitomize the dialogue between the arts? What is it in the painting that prompts viewers and artists alike to at once sympathize with the drowning heroine and identify with her to the point of staging themselves drifting along in the same fashion, suspended between life and death? These are the issues I should like to explore in this article in which Millais’s picture will be considered both as an object of material culture and as a ‘metamorphic image’ (Rancière 52)—a painting in its own right but also a symptom, an open tomb in which to bury one’s deepest anxiety or a screen onto which one can project one’s innermost desire. Starting with a few considerations on Millais’s original painting, this article aims to pursue the spectral presence of Ophelia across time and across the arts to demonstrate how the female figure resonates in various texts and images from literature to contemporary culture testifying to the mutability and lasting modernity of what could be termed the ‘ Opheliac ’ syndrome.

Ophelia I: Millais’s Ophelia  (1851–1852)

2 For a complete study of the editing of Hamlet for production, see Glick 1969.

4 The first thing to be noted when considering Millais’s picture is the persistence of a paradox. Indeed the painting is generally considered by critics as a literary picture illustrating Ophelia’s tragic death as expressed by Gertrude in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but as several critics have noted, the event was rarely actually represented on stage, as Gertrude’s monologue was censured (Rhodes 89), so that the picture actually reveals a forbidden scene in the play: it creates a composition from a truncated text and restores it to the full view of a spectator who is invited to return to the written text of the play and reassess the character of Ophelia beyond the theatre. 2

5 Indeed, from the Restoration to the end of the nineteenth century, Ophelia’s part on stage ‘was often cut or censured due to the lewdness of her mad-songs, condemned as unsuitable and indecent. For this reason, in order to soften the bawdy language with suave tunes, Ophelia’s role was often interpreted by singers’ (Falchi 172). Even in the original play, ‘[c]linically speaking, Ophelia’s behavior and appearance are characteristic of the malady the Elizabethans would have diagnosed as female love-melancholy, or erotomania’ (Showalter 4) and her part considered as indecent both for the actors and the female audience.

6 At the same time, Millais’s choice to depict this particular Shakespearean heroine is far from unique: according to Carol Solomon Kiefer and Richard Altick, during the nineteenth century, Ophelia was the single most represented subject of English literary painting (Altick 299). Both critics note that at least fifty images were represented in exhibitions of the Royal Academy alone (quoted in Falchi 175).

7 However, what makes Millais’s painting so unusual is the choice of the moment depicted and in some contemporary viewers’ opinions what made it subversive was his unconventional treatment of the subject and more particularly the blending of various genres, as the picture can be viewed as a portrait, a landscape scene or even a still life.

• 3 The most authoritative books on the subjects remain Nina Auerbach’s Woman and the Demon (1984), Bra (...)

8 If one chooses to see the painting as a portrait, as most feminist critics have done, 3 one cannot avoid considering that the image not only captures the moment of Ophelia’s passing but also dramatizes—precludes and foreshadows—the tragedy of the life and death of its model, Lizzie Siddal, Rossetti’s suicidal muse. The story of how the young model almost drowned and later caught pneumonia after lying in the bathtub full of water gone cold while sitting for the painting is a well-rehearsed one and has been told ad nauseam, so it only seems relevant to mention here as it may have fuelled the imagination far beyond the Victorian period as will be shown later.

• 4 The painting can be viewed here: http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/watts/paintings/2.html . Acces (...)
• 5 See Millais’s 1858 etching of the episode: http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O140176/the-bridge-of- (...)
• 6 See L. J. Nicoletti’s article: ‘Downward Mobility: Victorian Women, Suicide, and London’s “Bridge o (...)

9 Beyond individual destiny, what the young maiden’s drowning epitomized for a Victorian audience was the fatal consequence of surrendering to one’s amorous passion. Like George Frederick Watts’s painting Found Drowned  (1848–1850) 4 showing ‘death by drowning’ as described in Thomas Hood’s poem Bridge of Sighs, Millais’s initial drawing of the scene 5 could be read as a warning to young girls and as a visual moral message. Compared to those picturesque representations of the drowned woman, Millais’s picture differs in two ways: first, because it does not represent a dead woman but a woman about to die or attempting to die; second, because the distress of the young character is not linked to the urban environment typically seen as the cause of isolation and suffering for young girls (London bridges, the Thames or the Seine river). 6 As contemporary viewers noted, in Millais’s Ophelia the contrast between the lush nature around and the sinking figure further reinforces the lack of empathy on nature’s part. The radical choice made by Millais explains the mixed reactions by contemporary critics at the 1852 Royal Academy exhibition, such as the following:

There must be something strangely perverse in an imagination which sources Ophelia in a weedy ditch, and robs the drowning struggle of that love-lorn maiden of all pathos and beauty, while it studies every petal of the darnel and anemone floating on the eddy ( The Athenaeum , ‘Fine Art – the Royal Academy’ 25, 581).

10 However, the blurred contour of the white floating dress and the abundance of flowers surrounding the female body may also be interpreted as a way to show Ophelia’s gradual metamorphosis into a water-nymph. In this regard, the way the flowers coalesce with the female body enacts the description of Ophelia in the play as ‘Rose of May’ (Act IV, scene  v , line 156). Seen in profile, Ophelia’s entire figure merges with the landscape around, as if subsumed in nature. As William Holman Hunt and several sharp reviewers were quick to recognize, the painting is not just yet another representation of Ophelia but foregrounds the birth of a new art germinating at the crossroads of various genres and inventing a new form of landscape:

On looking closely into the painting, the finish is marvellous. The pollard trunk, the velvety green rind of the ‘envious sliver’, the moss and flowers and vegetable details, are positively mirrored as in a glass. The water-lily is the botanical study of a Linneus:–every incident and accident is depicted. Some of the leaves are green and vigorous, others are spotted, corroded and broken:–no form or phase is unobserved or omitted. Ophelia sinks so composedly and gradually, that the idea of one of Dr Arnott’s comfortable water-beds is suggested. Gorgeous as is her fantastic dress and gay the blue and red flowers of her ‘weedy trophies’, the flesh tints of her face and hands entirely hold their own’ ( Athenaeum ‘Fine Arts: Royal Academy’. Athenaeum 1282 (22 May 1852): 581–83.

11 In its detailed depiction of each flower stem, the painting is almost a botanical study—a feature underlined in the above commentary by the reference to Linneus. Interestingly, the reference to the contemporary physician Dr Arnott and his Hydrostatic Bed invention to prevent bedsores identifies Ophelia as a contemporary patient or invalid.

• 7 For a stimulating illustrated discussion of this theme, see: https://udayton.edu/imri/mary/a/assump (...)

12 However, the format of the picture as much as the recumbent position of the model (reminiscent of the contemporary paintings of The Lady of Shalott ) also invites a liturgical reading of the image. The arched format and golden frame and the horizontal position of the young woman align the painting with pictorial and architectural representations of the dormition of the Virgin Mary—an episode that was frequently but differently represented in Eastern and Western Art since its first mention in an apocryphal work of the fourth century, The Transitus Mariae (The Passing of Mary). In Eastern art, the episode is referred to as ‘Koimesis’ (falling asleep) and often shows Mary surrounded by apostles around the bier she lies on. 7

• 8 It is one of a set of fourteen on the life of Mary that were produced between 1640 and 1657 for the (...)

13 In Western art, the moment of the Virgin’s death changes through the centuries and tends to evolve and become one with the Assumption—a much more consensual episode of Marian Christianity. However, many famous visual representations must have been known to Millais, from Holbein or Fra Angelico or Mantegna in painting to architecture and tapestry: in Strasbourg where he travelled in order to sketch drawings for John Ruskin, the South portal of Notre-Dame cathedral shows a beautiful example of a sculpted dormition of the Virgin; inside the sacred building, the set of fourteen tapestries on the life of Mary 8 could also have inspired him. Just as his fellow-Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848–1849), Millais thus uses apocryphal Christian scenes to enhance the mystical character of Ophelia whose lifted hands evoke prayer or even sacrifice. As Gay Daly suggests ‘Ophelia drifts with palms upturned, just breaking the surface of the water, offering herself to death’ (Daly 41).

14 Suspended between life and death, Millais’s Ophelia is arrested in time and space, her body displayed and hidden from view, erased or diluted into the very surface of the water—an undulating surface that absorbs and reflects the female body and may stand for the transforming power of painting itself—a process by which bodies are both animated and commodified and eventually transformed into art. What this last reading of Millais’s Ophelia entails is a definition of the image as an unfixed, multi-layered entity that oscillates in time and space and produces new meaning at every new viewing. As Georges Didi-Huberman posits in Before the Image, Before Time: the Sovereignty of Anachronism:

9 ‘Devant une image, si ancienne soit-elle, le présent ne cesse jamais de se reconfigurer, pour peu q (...) Before an image, however old it may be the present never ceases to reshape, provided that the dispossession of the gaze has not entirely given way to the vain complacency of the ‘specialist’. Before an image, however recent, however contemporary it may be, the past never ceases to reshape, since this image only becomes thinkable in a construction of the memory, if not the obsession. (33) 9

15 Even grounded as it is in the nineteenth century, Millais’s Ophelia, an already mediated representation, is therefore bound to repeat and perform her textual elision and give rise to new interpretations that transform the experience of viewing the image as much as the viewer himself/herself. Described in Shakespeare as a ‘document in madness’ ( Hamlet , Act 4, Scene 5), Ophelia becomes in Millais’s depiction an image that, just like the mask of the Inconnue de la Seine ‘functions both as an archive of old images and as a generator of new ones’ (Saliot 23), or to use Walter Benjamin’s term, ‘a constellation’ (Benjamin 478).

16 All the unique qualities of the painting, such as the photographic detail of the flowers, the translucent light on the water, the spectral nature of the female body, or the half-parted mouth of the yearning face, participate in the composition of the painting. Together, they contribute to its dissemination in time and space that coincides with the transformations in technology, medicine, literature and the arts associated with modernity that occur in the course of the nineteenth century and reverberates in later twentieth century versions of the original image. This fusion between past, present and future is expressed in various ways by philosophers, art historians, psychoanalysts and artists from Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin to Freud and Baudelaire and is unsurprisingly formulated in the most visual way by a figure who is herself a bridge between the Victorians and the Edwardians: Virginia Woolf. Here is what she writes in A Sketch of the Past :

The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but it is then that I am living most fully in the present (Woolf 98).

Ophelia II: Out-of-focus and on Screen

• 10 ‘Parce qu’elle est tissée de longues durées et de moments critiques, de latences sans âge et de bru (...)

17 What Virginia Woolf so poetically articulates is an interweaving between past and present that is enacted through the image which, at different periods, acquires a new legibility. Building on this notion that the past may inform the present and the present actualize the past, I should like to argue in this section that, beyond Millais’s picture and carrying it forward, later representations of Ophelia in both text and image build on its potential to outlive its immediate reception and resurface in the most unexpected places and across media—in the visual as much as in the literary or more broadly poetic realm. The process has been described in art history by Aby Warburg as Nachleben , a concept of survival which disrupts the chronological construction of art history and puts forward instead the constant re-inscription of the past into the present. This notion of survival coincides with Walter Benjamin’s notion of the ‘dialectical image’—his own attempt at creating ‘a new cognitive model with respect to images and history’ (Saliot 44). As Didi-Huberman formulates it, the notion of survival ( Nachleben ) entails an untimely art history made of ghosts, anachronisms, and shifts: ‘The survival disorients history, opens it up, complicates it. In short, the survival anachronizes history’ (Saliot 44). 10

18 Warburg’s view of the circulation of images implies that the same image may convey contradictory messages and point to opposite directions, a phenomenon he described as ‘a symptom’, that is an event that threatens the traditional modes of viewing and interrupts the course of representation.

19 In the case of Ophelia , the symptom is made particularly visible first through photography, a medium that articulates the hypervisibility already present in Millais’s painting but that also blurs the boundaries between technology and art, scientific discourse and aesthetic experience. A complementary tool to painting at first, photographs were widely used in the nineteenth century by doctors and scientists alike, in the latter case to both document illness and provide a form of therapeutic help as showing the photographs to patients was believed to help them heal (Rhodes 132).

20 However, the comparison between the popular photographs that widely circulated in the 1870s to illustrate the character of Ophelia (as performed by Ellen Terry and numerous lesser-known actresses) and those used by doctors in asylums to study female madness foreground the complex, palimpsestuous nature of Ophelia as a sick woman, muse and myth. Thus, if we compare Julia Margaret Cameron’s best-known photograph of Ophelia (incidentally presented to Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1867) with photographs by British medical photographer Hugh Diamond—who was the first to take pictures of a wide range of inmates in an asylum and whose images were shown in the first exhibition of photographs held at the Royal Society of Arts in 1852, the same year as Millais’s Ophelia was exhibited—one cannot help being struck by the similarities between the two kinds of images: beyond using similar technologies, these various types of images display an attempt to probe into the female mind and manipulate the camera’s focus to draw the viewer into the depths of the character’s psyche. Indeed, as Sylvia Wolf comments about Cameron’s photograph representing Ophelia,

. . . nothing in the picture alerts viewers to its subject. The sitter is draped in a black cloak. She is lit from above right, so that her nose and high forehead form a delicate silhouette. The model could be portraying any number of characters in literature or art. (Cameron appears to have sometimes had a title in mind when she began photographing, and at other times titled a work later in response to the way a picture looked.) Once the title of this photograph is read, we become aware that the white rosebuds at the sitter’s neck—both closed, the outer petals wilting—allude to Ophelia’s life cut short before its flowering (Wolf 51).

21 Treated separately, one might think that Cameron’s and Hughes’s images are very different; however, taken together, it seems on the contrary that they both participate in the construction of the character of Ophelia as pure symptom. Indeed, both types of images ‘rely on facial expressions to present material evidence of insanity that will be linked to a fictional character’ (Rhodes 130). Beyond the context of their production, both instantiate the power of photography to reveal what Jacques Rancière calls the double poetics of the image, that is, its power to simultaneously reveal and hold the secret at the heart of all representation:

11 ‘La photographie est devenue un art en exploitant une double poétique de l’image, en faisant de ses (...) Photography became an art by exploiting a double poetics of the image, by making its images, simultaneously or separately, two things: the legible testimony of a history written on faces or objects and pure blocks of visibility, impervious to any narrativization, any intersection of meaning . . . . Photography became an art by placing its particular techniques in the service of this dual poetics, by making the face of anonymous people speak twice over—as silent witnesses of a condition inscribed directly on their features . . . and as possessors of a secret we shall never know, a secret veiled by the very image that delivers them to us (Rancière 11–15). 11

22 Like a magnifying glass, the medium of photography enlarges the figure of Ophelia, blowing up her face and expression so as to reveal her innermost nature, but her face—what Roland Barthes called the ‘face-object’ in his famous essay on Greta Garbo (Barthes 65)—remains enigmatic. In both cases, the title given to the photograph and the dress transform the young woman back into a literary figure—a legible sign—while paradoxically reducing her to anonymity, altering our perception of the image and exemplifying Henri Bergson’s remark that ‘Perception is never a simple contact of the mind with the object present; it is completely impregnated with memory-images which complete and interpret it’ (Bergson 174). In the same fashion, many of today’s contemporary artistic photographs of Ophelia use the viewer’s memory of the drowning muse as mediated by literature, art and even film. This is the case in Gregory Crewdson’s Untitled (Ophelia) , dated 2000/2001, a digital chromogenic print in which Ophelia quietly floats in front of a couch, and in Victor Burgin’s Ophelia , which rehearses images from Alfred Hitchcock’s masterful recasting of Ophelia in Vertigo and tries to seize the oscillation between stasis and movement to be found in Hitchcock’s aesthetics.

• 12 ‘le gros-plan n’arrache nullement son objet à un ensemble dont il ferait partie, dont il serait une (...)

23 From the still to the moving image, the transition is effected via the technique of the close-up which further transforms the female subject into an icon, reinforcing Gilles Deleuze’s famous analyses of the movement-image as he writes: ‘the close-up does not tear away its object from a set of which it would form part, but on the contrary abstracts it from all spatio-temporal co-ordinates, that is to say it raises it to the state of Entity’ (Deleuze 95–96). 12

13 ‘Mais plus encore, le gros plan fait du visage un fantôme et le livre aux fantômes’ (Deleuze 141).

24 Looking at these spectral images that travel from one creative mind to another, one feels the relevance of the critic’s intuition: ‘But, more importantly, the close-up turns the face into a phantom, and [abandons it to] phantoms’ (Deleuze 99). 13

25 In this new shift from image to film, music and back to literature in post-modern—and post-mortem—Ophelias, the very medium used in the making of these digital images questions the space or screen between the viewer and the object by showing the outside world as seen through the prism of narrative, memory and fantasy.

26 As Simonetta Falchi notes, in the twentieth century, the figure of Ophelia ‘has drifted apart from her frail origins to turn . . . into a subversive heroine—symbol of the victims of patriarchal domination (Showalter 1985)—and then again into the emblem of adolescent girls in need of guidance, under the burden of societal pressure (Pipher 1994)’ (Falchi 1).

• 14 For stimulating discussions of Virginia Woolf in the film The Hours , see Maria Leavenworth Lindergr (...)

27 In Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides  (1994), a novel that uses many pictorial references, the incipit presents the reader with a view of a teenager named Cecilia ‘slitting her wrists like a stoic while taking a bath’ (3) The narrator clearly describes her like a modern Ophelia as he adds: ‘they found her, afloat in her pink pool, with the yellow eyes of someone possessed and her small body giving off the odor of a mature woman, the paramedics had been so frightened by her tranquillity that they had stood mesmerized’ (3–4). In Sofia Coppola’s film adaptation (1999), 14 the close-up on the girl’s half-submerged face and staring look epitomises her existential malaise and strangely turns her into a Medusa-like figure. Even when she escapes death, the young girl remains somehow haunted by it, eventually ending her life in an even more visually traumatic way as she eventually jumps out the window and kills herself.

28 In the same fashion, in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours  (1998), a novel interweaving three narrative threads and heavily drawing from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Doris Lessing’s short-story To Room Nineteen , two of the three main female characters share a symbolical filiation with Ophelia. Stephen Daldry’s film adaptation of the novel further reinforces the visual legacy by using two striking filming strategies, first in the opening scene filmed underwater that shows Woolf’s drowning in the river, and then in a companion scene where Laura Brown, a fervent reader of Woolf, is about to attempt suicide and the water is seen flooding and receding in a ghastly hotel room. In both cases, the ‘Opheliac’ effect is achieved through the use of camera movement (moving underwater in the first scene and high-angle shot in the second case) and the use of water, a mediating element signalling the character’s gradual submersion. In both film adaptations, the intertextual references find a cinematic equivalent which transcends the initial Shakespearean image and demonstrates the haunting power of the original image which, even after losing its original meaning or form, nevertheless comes back like a ghost during the viewing experience. In all these recent reconfigurations of Ophelia, emphasis is laid on the medium itself that transforms the source image and returns it into a different, more effective spectre.

15 http://www.youtube.com/embed/4zUVppnTyq0 . Accessed on 27/6/2018.

29 In our digital culture, the figure of Ophelia has thus come to haunt the web in many different forms, reverberating and offering new narratives of the now mythical story, repeating the initial scenario of the budding-and-yet drowning female body, or changing it to accommodate new variations and revisions that accommodate various art forms. From Kate Bush’s pop Ninth Wave album cover (showing her wearing a life jacket) to contemporary lyrical adaptations (Moonlilies’s video clip to ‘Give me a cell’), 15 modern musical productions show emancipated Ophelias not only escaping death but regenerating in water and deploying their voices with renewed strength. In both cases, women assert their desire not only to utter their feelings but to make one with their art and become pure medium: a voice.

16 https:// vimeo.com/112312758 . Accessed on 27/6/2018.

• 17 In private conversation about the making process, Kristin McGuire writes that the project was ‘just (...)

30 In that chain of images, Ophelia’s vital breath and poetic aura remain powerfully present, animating the undulating surface of the screen as if puncturing the layer separating each individual female model and connecting all muses together. Exemplifying this shift from the nineteenth-century model to today’s empowered female artist, Davy and Kristin MacGuire’s Ghost of Ophelia  (2014) 16 —an art installation produced by using the water surface of an old basin as a canvas for the haunting hologram of Ophelia—demonstrates how new digital practices invite the viewer to participate in an immersive, aural and visual experience. Consciously rehearsing the original scenario of the Pre-Raphaelite muse, 17 the installation, placed opposite other Pre-Raphaelite works of art, is a moving picture in many ways. As a homage to Millais’s painting, Ghost of Ophelia recreates the site (and sight) of the actual sitting—that is, the event of the painting—but also revives it and recasts it, allowing the viewer to identify with the female model and revive her experience. Once the object of the painter’s and viewer’s gazes, Ophelia has now become both a material and a virtual subject, actively reaching out to the audience and inviting the museum-goer, or the broader Internet audience of the video footage, to step into the work of art and revel in its transparent beauty—an aesthetic encounter achieved through physical movement and auditory sensations

31 In 1985, Elaine Showalter famously wrote: ‘There is no “true” Ophelia for whom feminist criticism must unambiguously speak, but perhaps only a Cubist Ophelia of multiple perspectives, more than the sum of her parts’ (Showalter 95). In digital representation, whose salient feature is lack of closure (Rosen 319), every new artistic endeavour thus reverberates and enhances Millais’s unique painting through fluctuation and mediamorphosis, whereby transgression works across genres and media. Through the World Wide Web Ophelia thus lives on, inviting new narratives, inspiring new songs and outlining modern, haunting iconic faces.

Bibliographie

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Bergson , Henri. Matter and Memory . Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1911.

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Deleuze , Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image . Trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.

Didi-Huberman , Georges. ‘Before the image, before Time: the Sovereignty of Anachronism’. Trans. Peter Mason in Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and out of History. Ed. Claire Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg . Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003. 31–44.

Didi-Huberman , Georges. Devant le Temps. Paris: Minuit, 2000.

Didi-Huberman , Georges. L’image survivante, histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg. Paris: Minuit, 2002.

Dijkstra , Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture. Oxford: OUP, 1986.

Eugenides , Jeffrey. The Virgin Suicides. London: Abacus, 1994.

Falchi , Simonetta. ‘Re-mediating Ophelia with Pre-Raphaelite Eyes’. Interliteraria  20.2 (2015): 171–83.

Daly , Gay. Pre-Raphaelites in Love. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1989.

Glick , Claris. ‘ Hamlet in the English Theatre: Acting Texts from Betterton (1676) et Olivier (1963)’, Shakespeare Quaterly 20 (1969): 17–35.

Kemp , Martin. Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon. Oxford: OUP, 2012.

Kiefer , Carol Solomon. The Myth and Madness of Ophelia . Massachusetts: Amherst College, 2001.

Lindgren Leavenworth , Maria. ‘“A Life as Potent and Dangerous as Literature Itself”: Intermediated Moves from Mrs. Dalloway to The Hours ’. The Journal of Popular Culture  43 (2010): 503–23.

Meessen , Valerie. ‘Post Mortem: Representations of Female Suicide by Drowning in the Victorian Age’. Master’s Thesis, Radboud University (Netherlands), 2016. http://theses.ubn.ru.nl/handle/123456789/3754 . Accessed on 27/6/2018.

Nicoletti , L. J. ‘Downward Mobility: Victorian Women, Suicide, and London’s “Bridge of Sighs”’. Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London 2.1 (March 2004). Online at http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/march2004/nicoletti.html . Accessed on 27/6/2018.

Noël , Rachel. « Entre génie et Ophélie : images de Virginia Woolf dans The Hours  », Décadrages [En ligne], 16-17 | 2010, mis en ligne le 10 février 2011, consulté le 26 juin 2018. URL : http://decadrages.revues.org/238  ; DOI : 10.4000/décadrages.238

Pillière , Linda . ‘Michael Cunningham’s The Hours : Echoes of Virginia Woolf’. Revue LISA/LISA e-journal [En ligne], Vol. II – n°5 | 2004, mis en ligne le 02 novembre 2009, consulté le 26 juin 2018. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lisa/2912  ; DOI : 10.4000/lisa.2912.

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Showalter , Elaine. ‘Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism’. Shakespeare and the Question of Theory . Ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman , New York: Routledge, 1985. 77–94.

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1 To access the painting, click here: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/millais-ophelia-n01506 . Accessed on 27/6/2018.

3 The most authoritative books on the subjects remain Nina Auerbach’s Woman and the Demon (1984), Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity (1986) and Elisabeth Bronfen’s Over her Dead Body (1992).

4 The painting can be viewed here: http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/watts/paintings/2.html . Accessed on 27/6/2018.

5 See Millais’s 1858 etching of the episode: http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O140176/the-bridge-of-sighs-print-john-everett-millais/ . Accessed on 27/6/2018.

6 See L. J. Nicoletti’s article: ‘Downward Mobility: Victorian Women, Suicide, and London’s “Bridge of Sighs”’. Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London  2.1 (March 2004). See also Valerie Meessen, Post Mortem: Representations of Female Suicide by Drowning in the Victorian Age , 35–40.

7 For a stimulating illustrated discussion of this theme, see: https://udayton.edu/imri/mary/a/assumption-iconography-themes-and-evolution.php . Accessed on 27/6/2018.

8 It is one of a set of fourteen on the life of Mary that were produced between 1640 and 1657 for the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. They were paid for in part by Cardinal Richelieu. The Cathedral chapter of Strasbourg purchased them from Notre Dame in 1789.

9 ‘Devant une image, si ancienne soit-elle, le présent ne cesse jamais de se reconfigurer, pour peu que la dépossession du regard n’ait pas complètement cédé la place à l’habitude infatuée du “spécialiste”. Devant une image – si récente, si contemporaine soit-elle –, le passé en même temps ne cesse de se reconfigurer, puisque cette image ne devient pensable que dans une construction de la mémoire, si ce n’est de la hantise’ (Didi-Huberman 10).

10 ‘Parce qu’elle est tissée de longues durées et de moments critiques, de latences sans âge et de brutales résurgences, la survivance finit par anachroniser [ sic ] l’histoire’ (Didi-Huberman 87).

11 ‘La photographie est devenue un art en exploitant une double poétique de l’image, en faisant de ses images, simultanément ou séparément, deux choses : les témoignages lisibles d’une histoire écrite sur les visages et les objets et des purs blocs de visibilité imperméables à toute narrativisation, à toute traversée du sens . . . . La photographie est devenue un art en mettant ses ressources techniques propres au service de cette double poétique, en faisant parler deux fois le visage des anonymes, comme témoins muets d’une condition inscrite sur leurs traits . . . et comme détenteurs d’un secret que nous ne saurons jamais, un secret dérobé par l’image même qui nous les livre’. (Rancière 20–25)

12 ‘le gros-plan n’arrache nullement son objet à un ensemble dont il ferait partie, dont il serait une partie, mais ce qui est tout à fait différent, il l’abstrait de toutes coordonnées spatio-temporelles, c’est-à-dire il l’élève à l’état d’Entité’. (Deleuze 136)

14 For stimulating discussions of Virginia Woolf in the film The Hours , see Maria Leavenworth Lindergren (2010), Rachel Noël (2010) and Linda Pillières (2004).

17 In private conversation about the making process, Kristin McGuire writes that the project was ‘just a film shoot, albeit a very difficult one as I had to immerge myself under water in a very unnatural position with my chest being weighted down in order to keep me underwater. It was quite painful, but then myth has it that Elizabeth Siddal also suffered considerably when Millais painted her submerged in water for his famous painting.’(Private email to the author, March 19th 2018).

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique.

Laurence Roussillon-Constanty , « Tracing Ophelia from Millais to Contemporary Art: Literary, Pictorial and Digital Icons » ,  Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [En ligne], 89 Spring | 2019, mis en ligne le 01 juin 2019 , consulté le 12 mai 2024 . URL  : http://journals.openedition.org/cve/5438 ; DOI  : https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.5438

Laurence Roussillon-Constanty

Laurence Roussillon-Constanty is Professor of British Literature and Aesthetics at the Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour (ALTER, EA 7504), France. Her main research field is Victorian literature and painting and she has published numerous articles on text and image interactions in the Victorian period and a monograph on Dante Gabriel Rossetti (ELLUG, 2008). She is currently President of the French Victorian and Edwardian Studies Society (SFEVE) and Secretary of the International Association for Word and Image Studies (IAWIS). Laurence Roussillon-Constanty est Professeur des Universités en littérature et esthétique victorienne à l’Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour. Spécialiste des rapports texte-image, elle a fait sa thèse sur la peinture et la poésie de Dante Gabriel Rossetti et travaille sur la peinture et la critique d’art (John Ruskin). Présidente de la Société Française des Études Victoriennes et Edouardiennes, elle est membre de IAWIS depuis 2002 et Secrétaire de l’association depuis 2017. Elle est l’auteure d’une monographie : Méduse au miroir. Esthétique romantique de Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Grenoble : ELLUG, 2008) et a co-édité plusieurs ouvrages dont un ouvrage de traduction de textes de John Ruskin. Elle s’intéresse également au rapport entre art, science et littérature. Le dernier volume d’articles qu’elle a coordonné (avec Rachel Dickinson) porte sur le rapport entre texte et textile  : Laurence Roussillon-Constanty et Rachel Dickinson, Converging Lines: Needlework in English Literature and Visual Arts , E-rea [En ligne], 16.1 | 2018, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2018, consulté le 31 mars 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/erea/6586 . Ses autres publications incluent Outsiders Looking in. The Rossettis Then and Now, dirigé par David Clifford & Laurence Roussillon (London: Anthem Press, 2003) ; L’éblouissement de la peinture. Sélection de textes tirés de Modern Painters de John Ruskin, auteurs Fabienne Gaspari, Lawrence Gasquet, Laurence Roussillon-Constanty (Pau : Presses Universitaires de Pau, 2006) ; Sciences, Fables and Chimeras : Cultural Encounters , dirigé par Laurence Roussillon-Constanty, Dominique Vaugeois et Michael Parsons (Pau : Presses Universitaires de Pau, 2014). La liste de l’ensemble de ses publications est consultable sur le site du laboratoire de recherche ALTER de l’UPPA : http://alter.univ-pau.fr/fr/plugins/mypage/mypage/content/lroussi1.html?search-eywords=laurence+roussillon

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john everett millais - ophelia painting analysis

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Stories of Art tells you the great stories behind your favourite works of art. Please subscribe here: http://bit.ly/2vRUBRI

In this video I talk about the painting Ophelia by John Everett Millais. I give you my analysis of this wonderful painting and tell you about the painter, the model and the story. Ophelia is a character from Hamlet, but this particular scene is never shown on stage. You can see the real thing in the Tate Gallery in London.

Via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csJJWjtiRYY

by John Everett Millais

Home » The Arts » Painting, Drawing, Sculpture » H – M » Millais

John Everett Millais

John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851-52

FROM ‘MARA, MARIETTA’ Part Ten Chapter 9

The twins are particularly moved by the story of Lizzie Siddal, the drowned Ophelia in Millais’ painting: Insufficiently educated to become a governess or teacher, too talented and intelligent to settle for factory work or shop assistant, she built a career as a model for the Pre-Raphaelites. Rossetti fell in love with her, but the marriage that would give her a social existence was repeatedly put off. To make her less lower class, to give her the opportunity to cultivate herself, Rossetti wanted her to give up modelling, or rather to pose only for him; the sole alternative to marriage would then become impoverished spinsterhood. Lizzie did give up modelling, seeking to elevate herself in society, but not before posing for Millais: Stretched out in a bathtub with oil lamps underneath to heat the water, she posed as the drowned Ophelia. The last session lasted five hours, the oil ran out in the lamps; Lizzie was chilled to the bone, but did not complain: Her capacity to give herself up completely is what makes the painting so convincing. Finally married to Rossetti, she became pregnant; the child, however, died in her womb. Lizzie then took an overdose of opium and alcohol and killed herself.

FROM ‘MARA, MARIETTA’ Part Ten Chapter 8

The cat jumps off the bed; under the table, it rubs itself on my legs. Anna, her back against the headboard, draws up her legs and hugs her knees.

̶ Snúlli likes you, Sprague. It’s rare she’s affectionate with anyone but me.

She smiles into my eyes: Her gaze is disquieting, there’s an aware sexuality in her charm. I open the box: In one photo after another, in subdued Kodachrome colours, Anna and Gudrun take turns to play the drowned Ophelia: Now submerged in a stream, flower-strewn hair and long white dress flowing in the grassy current, now floating in reedy water, eyes and hands open to heaven, they perform variations on the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of femininity. As I study the images, Anna studies her face in a hand mirror.

Arthur Hughes, Ophelia, 1851-54

John William Waterhouse, Ophelia, 1889

̶  They’re really lovely, Anna. ̶  Do you like them?

She takes off her cardigan.

̶̶  Yes, very much.

With consummate skill she’s captured all the tropes of the romantic myth: still water as a call from the deep, reality yielding to dream, death as sleep.

̶̶  You’ve mastered light on water, Anna. ̶  You mean I know how to use a polarizing filter. ̶  And the flowers are very well arranged. ̶  Flowers! Snúlli, come!

The cat jumps onto the bed; Anna stretches out her legs and places the animal in her lap. So this is how you manage the ambiguities of adolescence, this is how you cope with its contradictions: Stroking the cat in your lap while Ophelia preserves your innocence, her death arresting you in childhood. Yes, you’ve staged things beautifully; you’ve realized your fantasy of a pure sexuality, a sexuality without the sex: The dead Ophelia, your second twin, never having become a woman, saves you from the violence of becoming one. But your photos are out of date, they don’t fool me: I know that though you be fifteen, you are impatient for deflowering— I can tell by how you blossom in my presence.

LUCINDA HAWKSLEY ON LIZZIE SIDDAL

Rossetti painted his new wife as the Queen of Hearts shortly after their return from their honeymoon. The viewer can appreciate how ill Lizzie was when modelling for this painting, she appears too listless to be convincing as the intended subject.

From the biography by Lucinda Hawksley, Lizzie Siddal: Face of the Pre-Raphaelites (NY: Walker & Co., 2004)

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Regina Cordium, 1860

CHRISTINE RIDING ON JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS

From Christine Riding, John Everett Millais (London: Tate Publishing, 2006) pp. 19-24 | Christine Riding is Head of the Curatorial Department at the National Gallery, London.

John Everett Millais, Ophelia , 1851-52 (detail)

If ‘Truth to Nature’ has become the motto of Pre-Raphaelitism, Millais’  Ophelia is considered by many to be its paradigm. The subject is taken from Act IV of Hamlet, when Queen Gertrude announces Ophelia’s death–drowned in ‘the glassy stream’–which happens offstage. Ophelia has been driven to madness after the murder of her father by her lover Hamlet, who has also cruelly spurned her. Millais spent up to eleven hours a day, during July to October 1851, painting at the Hogsmill River, near Ewell in Surrey. There he observed closely the forms and condition of the water, trees and plants. For example, the reeds on the left are fresh, damaged or dead and, at their base, blades of floating grass are caught, denoting the gentle flow of the stream. The composition thus combines the particularities of a rural location and Shakespeare’s text. The flowers are those that were growing on the river bank and those described by Gertrude or mentioned previously by Ophelia and her brother Laertes. Others were added for their symbolic value. The poppy near Ophelia’s right hand symbolises both sleep and death, often jointly referenced in Hamlet, as demonstrated by some of its most famous lines, ‘To die, to sleep, / To sleep, perchance to dream’.

From the Romantic period onwards, Hamlet was thought by many to be the greatest of Shakespeare’s sublime dramas. Thus depicting a scene from Hamlet was not unusual. Showing Ophelia about to drown, however, was. Indeed, it is remarkable how far Millais departed from conventional wisdom in his interpretation. Throughout the nineteenth century Ophelia was a favoured literary figure and preferred Shakespearean heroine for British artists. Richard Redgrave had exhibited a version of Ophelia seated at a river bank in 1842; in 1852, Arthur Hughes, a member of the growing Pre-Raphaelite circle, exhibited a painting showing the same moment. There was a tendency at this time to depict actual Shakespearean productions or representations that were suggestive of the theatre. Maclise’s Play Scene from Hamlet, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1842, retains the atmosphere of the play within a play and emphasises the Stürm and Drang of the moment with overblown theatrical gesturing and expressions.

Richard Redgrave, Ophelia Weaving Her Garlands, 1842

Eugène Delacroix, Death of Ophelia, 1843

The supernatural/magical plays, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, encouraged the conflation of Shakespearean subjects with the popular fairy subject-paintings, for example, Joseph Paton’s Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania . Millais’s Ferdinand and Ariel, inspired by The Tempest, displays both fantasy and artificiality, while paradoxically demonstrating Pre-Raphaelite formal principles and being set in the open air. Similarly Hughes emphasized the allusions made in Shakespeare’s text to Ophelia as a supernatural creature (more specifically a mermaid) as she sinks to her death, characterizing her in his painting as a pale, nymph-like creature, perched in the midst of an eerie, unnatural landscape. Uniquely in nineteenth-century art, Eugène Delacroix’s three versions of Ophelia at the stream (1838, 1843 and 1853), show her falling awkwardly into the water. Unlike the interpretations by Redgrave and Hughes, in which she is presented as a wronged innocent, Delacroix emphasizes that Ophelia has been seduced and abandoned by Hamlet, her figure wrapped in clothing reminiscent of bedsheets. Such an emphasis is wholly in keeping with Shakespeare’s original text, but was often edited out of Victorian theatrical productions and even published texts.

In a broader context, madness in young women caused by betrayal in love was a common literary, theatrical and operatic theme in the nineteenth century. Millais frequently attended the opera. He certainly saw Vincenzo Bellini’s I Puritani and perhaps Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. Both include so-called ‘mad scenes’.

John Everett Millais, The Bride of Lammermoor, 1878

William Holman Hunt, The Hireling Shepherd, 1851

In Millais’ interpretation, specific theatrical associations are expunged. Instead Ophelia exudes an intensified reality, which comes from a refusal to edit and idealise. Millais steers his subject away from the fantastical and prettified or, indeed, the awkward angularity and more lurid colouring of his earliest paintings, to present Ophelia’s death to the viewer as an actual event. The specificity of the figure—a real, living woman—is integral to this impression. Millais’s oft-noted obedience to Shakespeare’s text does not diminish the temporal ambiguity of this event. We know it is Ophelia, but what exactly anchors her to a specific period of history? This ambiguity may derive from a specific collaboration between Millais and Hunt while painting together in Ewell. Hunt was executing the landscape for The Hireling Shepherd in 1851-2, which is set in the contemporary world. The completed painting shows a shepherd attempting to seduce a shepherdess, her feet dangling over the edge of a stream. A single sheep, straying to the right, presages her fate.

Ophelia’s death had contemporary resonance given that drowning was by this time associated with ‘the fallen woman’ who, having sexually transgressed, is abandoned and commits suicide. The third scene of Augustus Egg’s trilogy Past and Present, exhibited in 1858, suggests as much, with the abandoned wife seated under the arch of a bridge by the Thames, clutching her illegitimate child.

Augustus Egg, Past and Present (No. 3), 1858

George Frederic Watts, Found Drowned, 1848-1850

G.F. Watts’ Found Drowned (1848-50) is unusually direct in portraying the body of a young woman lying prostrate under the arch of a bridge, a painting Millais may have known.

Later, in 1858, Millais executed an illustration to Thomas Hood’s poem The Bridge of Sighs, showing a young woman contemplating death on the Thames foreshore. The poem describes the finding of a drowned woman, and calls on the reader to view her fate with compassion rather than contempt.

John Everett Millais, The Bridge of Sighs, n.d.

William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience, 1853

With its conflation of realism and contemporary associations, Millais’  Ophelia is far more complex than a faithful illustration to Shakespeare. In comparison to his Pre-Raphaelite Brothers, however, who dealt with sexual transgression in more overt terms—see Hunt’s The Hireling Shepherd and The Awakening Conscience…

… and Rossetti’s Found— Millais filtered such social commentary in his paintings through a literary source or attempted to provoke sympathy via a gently poignant interpretation (as can be seen in The Blind Girl , which engages with the subject of poverty and vagrancy).

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Found,  1853

John Everett Millais, The Bridesmaid, 1851

In this context, Ophelia can be viewed as the last in a trilogy of paintings, executed between 1850 and 1852, involving a single female figure. The Bridesmaid (1851) shows a young woman passing a piece of wedding cake through a ring, legend stating that, if she does so nine times, she will experience a vision of her future lover. Although the orange blossom at her breast denotes chastity, the glazed eyes and parted lips denote desire, the image’s sensuousness accentuated by the veil of luxuriant hair, loosened about her shoulders.

Painted at approximately the same time, Mariana was inspired by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem of the same title, first published in 1830. The work was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1851, with the following lines from Tennyson’s poem printed in the catalogue:

She only said, ‘My life is dreary, He cometh not,’ she said; She said. ‘I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!’

The character of Mariana originates from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure . She has been in exile for five years, waiting for her fiancé Angelo’s return. As the play proceeds she is persuaded to participate in a ruse, posing in the dead of night as the virginal Isabella, whom Angelo desires. Having had sex with Mariana, Angelo is forced to agree to marriage at the close of the play. Thus Mariana’s role is ambiguous and ultimately tragic. Millais and Tennyson do not make direct reference to her subsequent fate, the focus of the poem and painting being the relentless passage of time, Angelo’s neglect of Mariana and her suicidal thoughts. In the poem these are signified by the repetition at the end of each stanza of the lines quoted above, and in the painting the stretching pose of Mariana—which, in accentuating her breasts and buttocks can be read as sexual yearning—the scattered leaves on the floor and the near-completed tapestry on the table.

John Everett Millais, Mariana (in the Moated Grange), 1851

John William Waterhouse, ‘I am Half Sick of Shadows’, 1915

But Millais’s Mariana cannot be described as an illustration of Tennyson’s poem in the strictest sense of the word, but rather an imaginative evocation. Only the mouse (bottom right) is mentioned in the text. In fact the tapestry on which Mariana has been labouring for so long is suggestive of Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott, first published in 1833 and revised in 1842, in which the eponymous Lady ‘weaves by night and day/A magic web with colours gay’. Her moment of revelation comes—‘I am half-sick of shadows’—on seeing ‘two young lovers, lately wed’. Mariana and The Lady of Shalott, shut away in their respective ‘prisons’, are observers of rather than participators in love and life.

The Bridesmaid, Mariana and Ophelia thus form a sequence…

John Everett Millais, The Bridesmaid, 1851 (detail)

… from the hopeful yearning of an adolescent…

John Everett Millais, Mariana, 1851 (detail)

… and the loneliness and sexual frustration of a grown woman…

… to the despair and suicide of a spurned lover.

All the women are lost in thought or madness. The individuality and realism of their faces underline that they are portraits of contemporary women, which makes the temporal setting of Mariana and Ophelia ambiguous.

The Afterlife of Ophelia

Christine Riding, John Everett Millais, Tate

J.B. Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite Body

PAINTING IN ‘MARA, MARIETTA’

Click on an image to go to the corresponding page.

Edouard Manet

Gustave Moreau

Jean-Honoré Fragonard

Gustave Courbet

François Boucher

Pablo Picasso

Henri Rousseau

Tamara de Lempicka

Nicolas de Staël

Egon Schiele

Hans Holbein, Younger

Vincent Van Gogh

Hieronymus Bosch

Caspar David Friedrich

Leda and the Swan

Andy Warhol

Remedios Varo

Salvador Dali

Claude Monet

William Morris

Paul Delvaux

Frida Kahlo

Dorothea Tanning

Leonor Fini

Why Read ‘Mara, Marietta’?

• References and Bibliography

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Work in progress: john everett millais ‘ophelia’.

One of the best-known examples of Pre-Raphaelite art is John Everett Millais’ painting of Ophelia, one of the most brilliant works of the artist’s career, and completed when he was only twenty-three. Although painted painstakingly according to Pre-Raphaelite techniques, the Brotherhood’s brief existence had ended before Millais started work on it, and his style was maturing away from his earlier more characteristic paintings, such as Isabella (1848-49) and Christ in the House of His Parents (1849-50), which had caused the controversy which split the Brotherhood asunder.

Its origins are very Victorian. Millais was a child prodigy who met like-minded young men including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt and formed an artistic movement. They had no need of traditional workshops staffed by skilled craftsmen to provide their materials, as artists’ colourmen were only too happy to sell them prepared canvases, paint and brushes. Oil paint was even becoming available in convenient metal tubes using ‘modern’ pigments, although at that time their cost would have limited use. These artists chose their own motifs rather than depending on the whims of patrons, and exhibited their paintings at the Royal Academy and other exhibitions and galleries.

Themes based on literary references were extremely popular, and Shakespeare’s characters well known by all. Next weekend I will look in more detail at the evolution of paintings of the death of Ophelia, from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, in detail. Suffice it to say here that it was high on the list of themes at the time, and thoroughly visual.

One principle in Pre-Raphaelite painting was the desire for luminous colour, and in an effort to exploit the optical properties of the paint layer, the commonly-used early technical solution to this was to apply paint to brilliant white ground which was still wet. I will consider this technique in more detail later, but this demanded careful planning in order to reserve space for each passage. Another principle was to paint from nature as much as possible, so Millais had to separate the figure of Ophelia from the background in his planning.

Although Millais made several preliminary studies, only four appear to have survived: one for the figure is in the Pierpont Morgan Library, a more finished sketch is in Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, a study for the head is in Birmingham City Art Gallery, and an oil study for the head is currently unlocated, according to Townsend and others (see the reference, below).

In early June 1851, Millais ordered the canvas on its stretcher from Roberson, a popular and reputable artists’ colourman in London which has been trading since 1810 and continues to do so today. This was delivered already primed with three layers of oil ground, consisting of lead white oil paint with white extenders of chalk, barium sulphate and china clay. On top of this is a further layer of ground which contains a mixture of zinc white and lead white, applied after the canvas had been stretched, presumably before its delivery. This cost the artist 15 shillings, or £0.75!

Millais made quite extensive and partly scribbled drawings onto the ground before starting to paint the background en plein air in July. He chose a site in Surrey, on the bank of the Hogsmill River, between Ewell and Kingston, where the land is flat and the ground wet, even in summer. At that time of year, there are usually many biting flies or midges, and these troubled the artist during his eleven-hour working days. He apparently painted under an umbrella, and may have worn a ‘midge net’ to protect his face from being bitten.

During this phase, William Holman Hunt was painting close by. The pair had gone to prospect for suitable sites near Ewell in late June: Millais for Ophelia, Hunt for The Hireling Shepherd (1851-52), and both completed the landscape phase of their paintings by the end of October.

The Pre-Raphaelite principle of painting in front of the motif paralleled movements in France such as the Barbizon School and Impressionism, but with one major difference: Pre-Raphaelites painted in painstaking detail, demanding prolonged and protracted work outdoors, to the point where such detailed paintings became almost impractical.

One puzzle with this painting is its apparent lack of flies in the paint layer. If you have ever tried painting en plein air under constant fly attack, you will understand that midges and other flies are attracted by the odour of oil paint, and usually become embedded in wet paint in large numbers. Yet I haven’t seen any remarks made following close examination of Ophelia that there are the bodies of flies in the paint, nor the marks made by the artist trying to remove them from the wet paint.

Although Millais is claimed to have started work on the figure in late January 1852, by which time the landscape would have been dry to the touch, he didn’t purchase the dress worn in the finished painting until March.

Millais’ model for the figure of Ophelia was Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ Siddall (1829–1862), one of the Pre-Raphaelite women who tragically died only a decade later from an opium overdose, after Rossetti taught her to paint and married her. An experienced model for several artists of the day, this time she was challenged in her work. Apparently from late January until March, each day she lay in a bath of tepid water, heated from underneath by lamps. It is famously reported that one day the lamps failed, she became chilled, developed a cold, and had to receive medical attention. Her father threatened Millais with legal action to recover the costs of that medical aid. Her dress wasn’t purchased until March, though, when Millais paid £4 for it.

The Pre-Raphaelite predilection for painting onto (or into) a wet brilliant white ground was sometimes claimed to be the secret of their success in oils. One paint sample has shown that Millais may have used the technique in this painting, but Townsend and others don’t see any more general evidence here.

There’s a good case that light passing through translucent layers of paint will be reflected from a white ground underneath, but the Pre-Raphaelite requirement that paint be applied to the ground when it’s still wet is harder to justify. It’s more likely that the practice was based on the concept of giornate in fresco painting. Because most Pre-Raphaelite paintings were so slow to paint, to use this technique the artist has to apply fresh zinc white ground to just the area which they will be painting that day, much as the fresco painter applies plaster for each day’s work before they start painting that day.

This paint section cut by Elizabeth Steele from a painting by Honoré Daumier shows the normal appearance of oil paint which has been applied to a thoroughly dry white ground: the ground, the thick layer of bright white in the lower part of the section, is clearly separated from the coloured upper paint layers. Painting into a wet white ground loses that separation, and may actually reduce reflection as a result.

Whether he did paint on a wet white ground, Millais laid down thin translucent layers of colour. His technique for flesh was different, and more similar to the multiple fine brushstrokes used when painting in egg tempera. This results in flesh which looks quite uneven when examined closely, but at normal viewing distances it has a thoroughly fleshy texture.

Perhaps the greatest challenge, more than the midges of summer or long tepid baths, were the flowers. The painting features elaborate references to the symbolic meaning of flowers, while being constrained to species which occurred in Surrey. These include: roses as a symbol of love; willow, nettle and daisy for forsaken love, suffering, and innocence; pansies for love in vain; violets for faithfulness, chastity, or a premature death; poppies for death; finally forget-me-nots for remembrance.

Many of these would have been in flower when Millais was painting outdoors in the summer, but those which adorn the figure of Ophelia would have presented a problem, as at that stage all the painting had there was the white space reserved for the figure. It’s not clear how Millais solved this. It is apparent, though, from the detail above that he superimposed zinc white to make the decoration in the dress sparkle.

When it had been exhibited at the Royal Academy later in 1852, Millais’ job was still not complete. To generate additional income, a print-maker then turned the oil painting into a print, an example of which is shown below.

Millais still wasn’t fully satisfied, and in 1873, over twenty years after it had been exhibited, he made some additions and alterations to some of its lush vegetation and the figure’s face.

Sometimes it may seem that nineteenth century and more modern painting lacks the craft tradition of earlier times. In the case of Millais’ Ophelia, that certainly isn’t true.

Joyce H Townsend, Jacqueline Ridge, Stephen Hackney (2004) Pre-Raphaelite Painting Techniques, Tate Gallery. ISBN 978 1 854 37498 1.

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The Vassar College English Department Student Journal of Critical Essays

The Modern Maiden on Film: An Expansion of “Representing Ophelia”

From being painted as a graceful fixture of nature to being written as a lesbian in a guerilla commune (Showalter 237), Ophelia of Hamlet is undoubtedly one of the most emblematic female characters of Shakespearean drama. Feminist literary critic Elaine Showalter traces the extensive iconography of Ophelia’s image in her essay “Representing Ophelia,” asserting that compiling this cultural history illuminates information about femininity and sexuality, as well as society’s shifting outlook on women (224). Showalter claims that “there is no true Ophelia”; each of these shifting visions of her should be dissected closely and then analyzed holistically as a part of the “cubist Ophelia”, or the multiple perspectives of her over time (238). However, this valuable work stopped short in the 1980s, vaguely predicting “a new perspective on Ophelia’s madness as protest and rebellion” (237). This claim was absolutely spot on, and since the 80s, productions of Hamlet have featured various renditions of this rebellious Ophelia. This essay will focus on the 2009 film directed by Gregory Doran (adapted from the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2008 production of Hamlet ) and the 2000 film adaptation directed by Michael Almereyda. Both the Doran and Almereyda films portray Ophelia’s madness as an active expression of rebellion against an oppressive system, as Showalter claimed many modern productions would, and this demonstrates society’s growing relationship with the Feminist movement. Lastly, in a more personal style, this essay considers whether an Ophelia completely free of the infantilizing and romanticizing male gaze is possible, imagining what changes to the original play might be needed to achieve such a result.

Gregory Doran’s 2009 production of Hamlet features an Ophelia, played by Mariah Gale, that upholds a traditionally feminine and obedient role and later rebels from that performance in her madness. Ophelia’s costuming and her relationship with her clothing throughout the play signify this change in perspective. Doran introduces Gale wearing her signature florals in her establishing scene with Laertes and Polonius, but with a modern and relaxed twist of pants that match the setting of her home. The deep programming of her obedience becomes clear when Polonius begins giving his lecture about behaving; Laertes and Ophelia compete to finish his sentences as fast as possible, indicating a childhood of competition to be the best child for their father. In her appearances at the court, she wears a girly floral dress, emphasizing her youth and femininity, and in her more formal use as a pawn for Claudius and Polonius to examine Hamlet’s madness, she sports a tight green dress, almost exhibiting herself as the flower sprouting from a green stem. Mariah Gale’s stiff body language during this scene, which features her only visible interaction with Hamlet, indicates a level of strained performativity. On any lines that reference the heavens, she returns mechanically to the same position: stretching one arm up to the sky and keeping her legs and core low to the ground. In this performance and every other obedient act she has performed to date, Ophelia makes a patriarchal bargain; she trades her autonomy, including her ability to have a romantic relationship, for her and her family’s survival in the court. Mariah Gale’s performance of Ophelia emphasizes this fact, especially by shedding that performative exterior in her madness. In her first appearance as a madwoman, she literally strips herself of her now dirtied floral dress —her feminine baseline—and screams, demanding recognition.

Mariah Gale’s depiction of madness is a pointed rebellion against her expected performance of a feminine, obedient woman. She not only takes hold of the way that she acts, but the way that others see her. By taking off her clothes, she and her body take power in the room and hold attention to her discretion. Her appearance is completely dirtied, and her mannerisms are large and grotesque. This manifestation of Ophelia’s madness could not be more different from the past versions which eroticize and romanticize her in various ways; Amanda Kane Rooks describes Jean Simmons’ madness from the 1948 Laurence Olivier film as almost entirely “ornamental” and featuring a “barely perceptible [level of] dishevelment” with flowers strung “appealingly” in her hair (478). In contrast, Mariah Gale’s mad Ophelia can be best described as animalistically angry at moments, with shaking and growling, and hauntingly poignant at others, with heartfelt pleas to Claudius and Gertrude. She is unpredictable. However, she demonstrates awareness of her surroundings. She is not a “vacuum”, as it was distressingly popular to call Ophelia and other schizophrenic women in the 1960s (Showalter 236). While Mariah Gale’s Ophelia is clearly agitated, she protects herself and demonstrates somewhat rational thought. She shouts at people who come close to her, standing up for her personal space, and she even breaks the fourth wall and looks in the camera on the line, “he is dead and gone” (Shakespeare 4.5.35). Upon her exit, she curtsies, humorously acknowledging and rebelling from the expectation that she maintains an obedient feminine performance.

In scene 4.5, Doran and Gale show a clear commitment not only to subverting and rebelling against the popularly beautified, mad Ophelia, but also to demonstrating respect for Ophelia as a complex character through a realistic depiction of her madness. Gale enters the scene covered in mud and carrying weeds, which is much closer to what Ophelia would have looked like had she gone into the countryside to pick flowers. This not only strays from the romanticized Ophelia that creatives love to conjure, but also generates a respect for Ophelia’s experience. The director and actor, in an attempt to unlock more layers of her experience and depict her realistically, acknowledge that Ophelia’s experiences and thoughts have value without needing to be aesthetically pleasing. This approach differs from the prescriptive and demeaning Victorian approach to Ophelia. As Showalter describes, the lyrical and “faded beauty” of Ophelia became the original icon of a madwoman, a “case study” for hysteria commonly seen in young women (229). Rather than working from real experience, medical professionals used a 17th century playwright’s dramatic vision of a madwoman as a blueprint to define and categorize real women’s mental illnesses (Showalter 230). In contrast, Doran and Gale attempt to empower Ophelia through real experience, and in doing so, assert Ophelia’s existence as an agent with complex thoughts and contributions to the story beyond being consumed as beautiful art.

The Michael Almereyda adaptation provides a more blatantly rebellious Ophelia played by Julia Stiles; Almereyda increases and emphasizes her visual role by inserting her in multiple key scenes she doesn’t normally witness. Stiles’ Ophelia and her signature bright red costumes now occupy an unavoidable visual presence in the environment of Hamlet . Almereyda pushes her to the forefront of the story, resembling a romantic lead opposite Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet. Their romance immediately establishes itself as intimate, monogamous, and historical; they kiss in the very first scene. Hamlet plays video footage of their romance over and over again, giving the audience a hint of their history embedded in both his tapes and memories. Stiles has moments entirely to herself on screen, living in her own apartment which is explicitly labeled as hers, and spending time on her passion for photography. Her personhood exists outside of her love for Hamlet and her obligations to her family. As Rooks explains, this Ophelia has a “decidedly androgynous” style of baggy, square clothes and very little make-up (477). These visual and logistical departures from the typical Ophelia immediately establish her importance in the story and defy the traditional, passive role she tends to fill.

Even though she clearly possesses more autonomy than a classic Ophelia, Stiles’ version  still experiences suppression and infantilization. Staying relatively true to Shakespeare’s original dialogue, Polonius restricts Ophelia from continuing her relationship with Hamlet even though Almereyda makes it clear that in his world of the play, she is a young adult living alone. Additionally, resembling the Freudian interpretations that were popularly incorporated into Ophelia’s relationships with the men in her family (Showalter 236), Liev Schreiber’s Laertes inserts incestuous undertones through his heavily whispered goodbyes to Ophelia and his tight embrace, even stealing one of her hairpins as a trophy. Ophelia’s body is essentially invaded in the scene in which Claudius and Polonius use her to spy on Hamlet. Instead of hiding in the same physical space as the dialogue, they wiretap Ophelia, weaving a microphone under her clothing. This, in combination with her consistent silence that reveals her subscription to social expectations, demonstrates Ophelia’s oppression under a “determined patriarchy that sanctions her constant surveillance as well as the possessive involvement of the men around her” (Rooks 477). By strengthening the weight of oppression on Ophelia, Almereyda sets the stage for her inevitable rebellion.

Ophelia’s madness in the Almereyda film manifests as a rebellion that defines her as an individual agent and avoids eroticization. Similar to Doran, Ophelia disrupts the social order through sound and gesture. Stiles interrupts a very public visit to the Guggenheim museum, shouting and kicking and until she has to be escorted away. After disrupting the social performance, Almereyda incorporates Ophelia’s established passion into her defiant madness; she flicks photographs of flowers to replace the physical flora she gives to Claudius, Gertrude, and Laertes. This choice creates a dynamic arc in her passion, defining it as a tool for her autonomy: she uses it to dissent and advocate for herself. Additionally, although morbid, she demonstrates her ability to make her own decisions through her suicidal ideation, as she fantasizes about jumping into Claudius’s pool early on in the movie. This separates her drowning from Hamlet’s suicidal thoughts and ensures that she is prescribed autonomous thought by the audience. That way, even though she stops wearing her signature red after her breakup with Hamlet, Ophelia still maintains unquestionable credit for her decision to drown herself.

In their posthumous depictions of Ophelia, neither Doran nor Almereyda give in to the  past trend of voyeuristically showcasing her beauty. Rooks calls this trend a kind of “necro-aesthetic” (481) which objectifies and romanticizes Ophelia’s death. The Doran film features only a fleeting shot of Laertes holding Ophelia’s corpse in a simple white dress, and has absolutely no visual of Ophelia drowning. The Almereyda version has a medium shot of Ophelia’s drowned, drifting body in the fountain, but avoids her face and does not permit the audience to relish the beauty of a “sensuous siren” as featured in Millais’s famous painting (Showalter 229).  In their living moments, both of these Ophelias “demand acknowledgement” (Rooks 480). In contrast, both productions treat their dead Ophelias with a neutral lens, as individuals who made the tragic decision to end their lives, not beautiful women turned into art for the audience’s viewing pleasure.

However, the recent increase of rebellious Ophelias does not eliminate the need for Feminism and Feminist criticism; modern film stereotypes often paint a sexist image of women. Additionally, the sexism embedded in the text would require a change so drastic that it would be considered an entirely different play. As amazing and subversive as these two modern productions are, in order to have a truly independent Ophelia, it would take changes that would make the play very different. Philippa Kelly asks the question that I myself am asking: “in a contemporary performance of Hamlet , can Ophelia be rescued from pitying infantilization”?  I think depicting a victimized Ophelia does not exacerbate this pitying view, but depicting her as existing solely in that victimized state absolutely does. Hamlet as written features much of Ophelia’s silence, which she is forced to keep in front of people in power: Polonius, Claudius, Hamlet, and even Gertrude. In my vision of Ophelia, she can be stifled by society and in her individual relationships, but the play itself must have a neutral perspective and acknowledge her as an agent: this ideal can be achieved by altering and adding a few key moments.

Working backwards, Ophelia’s death is the only one that occurs during the timespan of the play not shown on stage save for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Those two are somewhat expendable as comedic characters who serve a specific purpose of spying on Hamlet for Claudius and Gertrude. When they are not needed anymore, the audience doesn’t have a strong emotional tie to them, so the narrative only lightly references their deaths. Shakespeare assumes Ophelia fits into this category as well; he does not bestow her the dignity of departing the story on stage. Gertrude relates her testimony of Ophelia’s death and insists it was an accident: she and her “fantastic garlands” (4.7.192) fell in the water after an “envious sliver” (4.7.198) of weeds below broke. Shakespeare’s version of Ophelia’s demise maintains her rigidly quiet femininity. Even in death, she is no one’s obligation. Up until this point, she is entirely conceived of as woman as object; Laertes and Polonius order her to “think [her]self a baby”, Claudius and Polonius use her as a plot device, and Hamlet appears to love her until he bluntly drops her like a child who lost interest in a toy (Shakespeare 1.3.114). To combat this objectification, Ophelia must have the space on stage to make the decision to drown. I want her to have a soliloquy after an entire play of obedience and silence. Her suicide must indisputably be an act of rebellion. While it may be logistically difficult to depict Ophelia drowning onstage, it is ridiculously easy to have her open her mouth and speak.

In addition to giving her autonomy in death, I want to see her autonomy in joy. Before she dies, one scene in which she releases the performance that she keeps up for others will suffice. Maybe that’s in romance, but that wouldn’t be my favorite choice. I would love for her to have a passion. Maybe something that ties in to her death; singing, floral arranging, hiking, or something altogether different. Heavy metal. Something that makes noise. Maybe something Laertes knows about and loves and keeps secret with her. Maybe she paints. Yes, the Almereyda film gives her a hobby, but it sticks out as an addition that strays from the text because it’s featured in silence. I want her passion, something that forces the audience to see her as a complex character who can make the choice to use at least some of her time how she wants, to demand verbal acknowledgement. In order to loosen the grip of the infantilizing male gaze, Ophelia must have the space on stage to be , as Hamlet considers for himself over and over. This addition would not be inappropriate for a version of the play set in the past, and it would not contradict the oppression that Ophelia certainly experiences. Giving Ophelia the chance to drop her performance and experience an instant of peace or pleasure would actually reveal the extent to which her world limits her. The humanity and agency of women experiencing such a force of oppression exists most viscerally in ephemeral moments–in breaths, thoughts, and passions. Returning a few of these instances to Ophelia gives a glimpse of her character as a fully formed being. Fundamentally, these changes further Showalter’s vision of a cubist Ophelia, adding another living, breathing dimension to this iconic Shakespearean character. While the trend of rebellious Ophelias demonstrates the world’s growing warmth toward the Feminist movement, creatives must maintain steadfast in their advocacy for the representation of dynamic female characters in new and old media.

Works Cited

• Hamlet. Directed by Gregory Doran, performances by David Tennant and Mariah Gale, BBC, 2009.
• Hamlet. Directed by Michael Almereyda, performances by Ethan Hawke and Julia Stiles, Miramax, 2000.
• Kelly, Philippa. Contemporary Ophelia , HowlRound Theatre Commons, 10 May 2015. howlround.com/contemporary-ophelia. Accessed 11 Dec. 2020.
• Rooks, Amanda Kane. “The ‘New’ Ophelia in Michael Almereyda’s ‘Hamlet.’” Literature/Film Quarterly , vol. 42, no. 2, 2014, pp. 475–485. JSTOR , www.jstor.org/stable/43798981. Accessed 30 Nov. 2020.
• Sciamma, Céline. interview with author, Perth Festival, Perth, 2019.  https://www.perthfestival.com.au/media/nqfhguvf/media-kit-portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire.pdf
• Showalter, Elaine. “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism”, Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, Routledge, Methuen, 1985. http://sites.uci.edu/shakespeare/files/2015/10/Showalter.pdf
• Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, The Folger Shakespeare Library, edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, updated edition, Simon & Schuster, Washington D.C., 2012.

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John Everett Millais – Ophelia painting analysis

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In this video I talk about the painting Ophelia by John Everett Millais. I give you my analysis of this wonderful painting and tell you about the painter, the model and the story. Ophelia is a character from Hamlet, but this particular scene is never shown on stage. You can see the real thing in the Tate Gallery in London.

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“The Unknown Woman” Photo and “Ophelia” Painting Comparison Essay

Nineteenth-century paintings and photographs fascinate the viewer with their mystery and profundity. This paper presents a detailed analysis and comparison of two works, a photograph “The Unknown Woman,” taken in 1855 by Southworth and Hawes, and ‘Ophelia,’ painted in 1884 by Sir John Everett Millais. Both works depict beautiful women but have different effects on their viewers, mainly because of their contrasting semantic content. This analysis will detail and compare these two works of art – their techniques, meanings, similarities, and differences.

First, it is worth considering the historical background and the initial emotions evoked by both works. Both were created in the second half of the nineteenth century, “Ophelia” was painted in oil on canvas by Sir Millais (Cassidy 26). Since Millais also created illustrations for literary works, it becomes evident that he was inspired by William Shakespeare’s character (Cross 317).

The artist succeeded in conveying the girl’s beautiful face and exquisite body lines. Ophelia lies in a stream surrounded by greenery – herbs, trees, and flowers. The painting is tranquil yet refreshing, making the viewer wonder what is on the mind of this enigmatic girl. The second work, a photograph of an unknown woman taken in Southworth and Hawes studio, arouses the same emotion.

It shows a slightly smiling young girl with beautiful hair and jewelry earrings. Although we cannot see what the lovely lady is wearing in this picture, her bared shoulders indicate a bright strapless dress. This portrayal is precisely the image created by the photographer – the young, ruddy, and dressy girl that is impatiently waiting for the photographer to take a shot.

Both works are dynamic despite the seeming statics at first. This effect is achieved primarily through the girls’ facial expressions – Ophelia looks relaxed, and thoughtful, while the girl in the photograph, on the contrary, looks confident and slightly smiling (Nikiforova 4). Both girls in the works do not look at the viewer, which allows making a more holistic perception of the picture. In “Ophelia’s” case, the viewer looks intently at the background.

Moreover, this painting is of particular aesthetic value precisely because the artist has both concealed and highlighted the girl’s figure (Nord 375). She seems to sink into the surrounding verdure on the one hand but stands out on the other using various background colors to emphasize her individuality. As for the photograph of the unknown girl, there is no background; the viewer sees only the portrait and visually works with it. This way, the focus of attention is transferred to the mimics, and the primary aesthetic value of this work is precisely to allow the viewer to construct the story and the image himself.

It follows from the above that both works are fascinating individually and in pair, as they share many similarities and many differences. “Ophelia” makes the viewer consider the multifaceted background and composition of the painting. The picture of the unknown girl attracts by its simplicity and dynamism.

For me, these two such different paintings give approximately the same feeling, but in slightly different shades. Ophelia’s painting gives me peace of mind and pushes me to think in a measured, peaceful way. The photograph of the unknown girl, on the other hand, also induces peace, but in a dynamic way – giving energy, urging me not to focus on a single moment.

The authors intended to encourage their viewers to reflect, reassure them and help them structure their thoughts through their work. At the same time, the authors put energy into their paintings, an impetus for new endeavors and a reimagining of reality. These works are of genuine aesthetic quality because they offer a great deal of room for reflection, which is the most valuable and attractive in works of art.

The aesthetic quality of these works is not in their form, color, and the figures depicted, but in how they challenge the viewer to think about the artist’s message. The pictures both bring peace and energy at the same time and feel as if they are both vintage and relatively recent – they are true to be called a great pieces of art.

Works Cited

Cross, Anthony. “Art Criticism as Practical Reasoning.” The British Journal of Aesthetics , vol. 57, no. 3, 2017, 299–317. Web.

Cassidy, Victor. Artistic Collaboration Today: Profiles of Creative Teams in Diverse Media. McFarland & Company, 2018.

Nord, Deborah. “George Eliot and John Everett Millais: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Realism”. Victorian Studies, vol.60, no. 3, 2018, pp. 361-389. Web.

Nikiforova, Anna. “Mirror as a Pre-screen Image in Tennyson’s Poem “The Lady of Shalott” and Pre-Raphaelite Illustrations.” Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, no. 284. Web.

Southworth & Hawes. Unidentified Woman . 1855. George Eastman Museum, New York. Flickr. Web.

Sir John Everett Millais. Ophelia . 1894. Tate, London, Great Britain. Tate. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2022, October 23). “The Unknown Woman” Photo and “Ophelia” Painting Comparison. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-unknown-woman-photo-and-ophelia-painting-comparison/

"“The Unknown Woman” Photo and “Ophelia” Painting Comparison." IvyPanda , 23 Oct. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/the-unknown-woman-photo-and-ophelia-painting-comparison/.

IvyPanda . (2022) '“The Unknown Woman” Photo and “Ophelia” Painting Comparison'. 23 October.

IvyPanda . 2022. "“The Unknown Woman” Photo and “Ophelia” Painting Comparison." October 23, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-unknown-woman-photo-and-ophelia-painting-comparison/.

1. IvyPanda . "“The Unknown Woman” Photo and “Ophelia” Painting Comparison." October 23, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-unknown-woman-photo-and-ophelia-painting-comparison/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "“The Unknown Woman” Photo and “Ophelia” Painting Comparison." October 23, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-unknown-woman-photo-and-ophelia-painting-comparison/.

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The Language of Ophelia’s Flowers

There is a willow grows askant the brook, That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream. Therewith fantastic garlands did she make Of crowflowers , nettles , daisies , and long purples That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, But our cold maids do dead-men’s-fingers call them. Hamlet , Act IV Scene VII

Botanical symbology was significantly utilized in the plays of Shakespeare and the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites. With this shared reverence for the language of flowers and their truthful observation of nature, the pairing of mediums, as exemplified in the painting above, formed timeless visuals of universal themes. Heeding Ruskin’s tenets of aesthetic, “to  reject nothing ,  select nothing, and scorn nothing ” in nature, the Pre-Raphaelites depicted Shakespeare’s words in painstaking detail (Barnard 4). And no painting better exemplifies this fidelity to the biodiversity of Shakespearean settings than John Everett Millais’ Ophelia .

In 1851, Millais set out for Hogsmill River in search of an embankment to lay the scene of Ophelia’s drowning (Riggs). Through the lens of Pre-Raphaelite ideology, Millais began to breathe life into the haunting scene of Ophelia’s demise as he applied the structural and textural details of the English riverside to canvas. From the gnarled bole and boughs of the crack willow to the algae flowing like the hair of a water nymph, Millais beautifully encapsulated the floral symbology of Hamlet as understood in the Victorian Era. In addition, he included several significantly symbolical flowers, such as the red poppy and forget-me-nots, to intermix with the botanical references in Gertrude’s monologue.

In order to understand the complete story Millais has told through the trailing “weedy trophies,” I have analyzed the significance of the flowers during both the Victorian and Elizabethan Era. The appropriateness of investigating the significance of botany during the Elizabethan Era is not just in relation to the context of Shakespeare’s life, but also the role Queen Elizabeth I played in the publication of books on botany and gardening (Quealy 12).

Along with the confirmed botanical symbology made in both Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Millais’ Ophelia , I have included many of my own surmises on the various floral arrangements floating on the eddy that have yet to be explored.

Below, you will find a list of 28 botanical references I have analyzed in alphabetical order:

Victorian Meaning of Asphodel : My regrets follow you to the grave.

My first attempt at identification begins with the White-Flowered Asphodel ( Asphodelus albus ) that I believe to be depicted in Ophelia’s right hand. Asphodel, also known as “king’s spear,” was brought to England in 1551 and was thought to be the “food of the dead,” thus it was planted throughout cemeteries (Graves 328; Belanger 278). Though the traditional use and Victorian meaning of asphodel strongly supports my conjecture, I am convinced that it was also used as a literary allusion, which I will further elaborate on in a subsequent blog.

This perennial’s association with death was first recorded in the oral lore of Ancient Greece (Reece 392), which is revealed in the asphodel meadows of the underworld as depicted in The Odyssey :

“And Hermes the Healer led them on, down the dank, moldering paths and past the Ocean’s streams they went and past the White Rock and the Sun’s Western Gates and past the Land of Dreams, and soon they reached the fields of asphodel where the dead, the burnt-out wraiths of mortals make their home.” Homer, The Odyssey

“. . . the ghost of clean-heeled Achilles marched away with long steps over the meadow of asphodel .” Homer, The Odyssey

Here are just a few more references to further convince you of the powerful symbology of the asphodel :

“The dead are made to eat asphodels about the Elysian meadows.” Sir Thomas Browne, Urn-Burial (1653)

“Others in Elysian valleys dwell, Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel .” Alfred Tennyson, Lotos-Eaters (1832)

“The tints of the green carpet deepened; and when, one by one, the white daisies shrank away, there sprang up in place of them, ten by ten of the ruby-red asphodel .” Edgar Allen Poe, Eleonora (1850)

“I had buried my romance in a bed of asphodel .” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890)

“There asphodels are scattered through the night, like ghosts of young beseeching hands.” William Faulkner (scribed with drawings he made in 1919)

“And he who wore the crown of asphodels , Descending, at my door began to knock.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Two Angels

“I was cheered when I came first to know that there were flowers also in hell.” William Carlos Williams, Asphodel , That Greeny Flower (1955)

Baby Blue Eyes

Though this dainty California native wildflower was readily available for garden cultivation in England, I have yet to locate a credible source with the Victorian symbology of Nemophila . Nevertheless, I am still determined to make a claim that the small blue flower clearly represents a Baby Blue Eyes ( Nemophila menziesii ).

Victorian Meaning of Dog Rose : Pleasure & Pain

The wild roses Millais refers to as dog roses are interchangeable with the name Briar Rose ( Rosa carina ), a symbolic rose often utilized in depictions of the folktale Little Briar Rose , also known as Sleeping Beauty .

In Elizabethan times, this wild rose, originally spelled as “brier” often referred to any wild plant with thorny stems, like the blackberry bramble, or sharp elements, like the Hawthorn (Ellacombe 35).

Victorian Meaning of Crowfoot & Buttercup : Ingratitude

I am in full agreement with the Plant Curator ‘s identification of the lower right flowers as Stream Water Crowfoot ( Ranunculus penicillatus ), blooming amongst the conglomerate of algae. According to the Online Atlas of the British and Irish Flora , this relative of the buttercup ( Rancunculus) , is found in “flowing rivers and streams,” which may mean they are present along the embankment of the Hogsmill River. Though Victorians referred to the buttercup as a crow-flower, Elizabethans identified the Ragged Robin ( Lychnis flos-cuculi ) as the crow-flower, which I discuss in length later (Ellacombe 64).

Victorian Meaning of Cabbage Rose : Ambassador of love

“The Rose is a beautiful flower, but it always fills me with sorrow by reminding me of my sins, for which the Earth was doomed to bear thorns.” Saint Basil

The two roses depicted by Millais seem to resemble the form of the Cabbage Rose ( Rosa centifolia ), also known as the Provence Rose , which were introduced to England prior to Shakespearean times (Ellacombe 266). In addition, John Gerard’s Herball , a botany book utilized by Shakespeare, refers to the Provence Rose as the Holland Rose, also known as the Cabbage Rose (Quealy 202).

“With two provincial roses on my razed shoes.” Hamlet , Act III Scene II

The delicate rose buds that lay by her cheek and dress represent youth, love and beauty. However, some roses were used as a treatment for madness and symbolized youthful death (Ellacombe 264).

The literary meaning of the rose is most eloquently described by Ellacombe:

” . . . the Rose is simply the emblem of all that is loveliest and brightest and most beautiful upon earth, yet always with the underlying sentiment that even the brightest has its dark side, as the Rose has its thorns; that the worthiest objects of our early love are at the very best but short-lived; that the most beautiful has on it the doom of decay and death.” Henry Ellacombe, The Plant-Lore and Garden-Craft of Shakespeare

“Till our scale turn the beam. O rose of May, Dear maid, kind sister, sweet Ophelia! O heavens, is ’t possible a young maid’s wits Should be as mortal as an old man’s life?”  Hamlet , Act IV Scene V (According to Gerard’s Herball, the rose of May is also known as the Cannell Rose)

Victorian Meaning of Columbine : Folly

The three-parted leaves of this poisonous flower came to symbolize the Holy Trinity, while the dove-like cluster of spurs represented the Holy Spirit (Thomas and Faircloth 84). However, the Columbines (most likely Aguilegia vulgaris , or the Common Columbine ) Ophelia gives out symbolized Gertrude’s infidelity and her engagement in cuckoldry (Thomas and Faircloth 85).

There’s fennel for you, and columbines .—There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me. We may call it “herb of grace” o’ Sundays.—Oh, you must wear your rue with a difference.—There’s a daisy . I would give you some violets , but they withered all when my father died. Hamlet, Act IV Scene V

The columbine flower does not seem to be present in Millais’s Ophelia .

Victorian Meaning of Daisy : Innocence

The bloom of the English Daisy ( Bellis perennis ), a native wildflower of Britain, is short-lived. Consequently, daisies appropriately symbolize sadness, grief and death (Quealy 192). Shakespeare also plays on the daisy’s association with child-like innocence as Ophelia weaves them into her own garland.

“There with fantastic garlands did she come Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies , and long purples.” Hamlet , Act IV Scene VII

Victorian Meaning of Daffodil : Regard

“The Daffodillies fill their cup with tears.” John Milton, Lycidas

I believe the brown sheath on the green stem near Ophelia’s right palm is most representative of the stem of a Daffodil .

The Wild Daffodil ( Narcissus pseudo-Narissi s) was readily found in the fields of England during both Shakespeare’s and Millais’s time (Ellacombe 74) . In addition, the Pre-Raphaelites highly revered Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and Milton, all of whom wrote on the form of Daffodils (Ellacombe 72).

“In its general expression the Poet’s Narcissus seems a type of maiden purity and beauty, yet warmed by a love-breathing fragrance; and yet what innocence in the large soft eye, which few can rival amongst the whole tribe of flowers.” Dr. Frobes Watson’s description of the poetic form of the Daffodil (Ellacombe 75)

It may a far reach on my part as the flower cup is indistinguishable, but would it not be a romantic symbol on Millais’s part?

Victorian Meaning of Carnation : Atlas! for my poor heart

Victorian Meaning of Variegated Pink : Refusal

Victorian Meaning of Gillyflower : Bonds of affection

I have found no other confirmation of this, but I am completely convinced that I see Carnations and Pinks (flowers of the genus Dianthus) amongst the floating bouquets. Both carnations and pinks were common during the Elizabethan era as they were a remedy for heart pain. During the Victorian Era, carnations, also known as Gillivors and Gilly-tiesels , were heavily cultivated and utilized in many Pre-Raphaelite paintings as symbol of “a woman’s pure love” (Mancoff 82).

Though Dianthus are not referenced in Hamlet , I believe that Millais was fully aware of this flowers symbolic significance to Shakespeare. Based on the abundance of carnation in Shakespeare’s plays, these flowers may have become readily available in florist shops and exhibited in English gardens in the 1600s (Ellacombe 44). Additionally, the carnation was one of several flowers fo be associated with Queen Elizabeth I (Quealy 190).

It is noteworthy that carnations were also a popular component of Roman, Greek and Athenian garlands (Ellacombe 43).

Victorian Meaning of Fennel : Worthy of all praise; Strength

Though I do not believe it is featured in Millais’s painting, Fennel ( Foeniculum vulga re) is a significant botanical symbol in Hamlet .

“There’s fennel for you, and columbines.” Hamlet , Act IV Scene V

This sacred herb is used as an “emblem of flattery” in literature and art. So, to give fennel is to flatter the recipient (Ellacombe 91).

Victorian Language of Forget-Me-Nots : True love; Forget me not

As the name suggests, this flower represents the hopes of everlasting remembrance. As the Plant Curator suggests, these are most likely Water Forget-Me- Nots ( Myosotis scorpioides ) on either side of the stream.

Victorian Meaning of Hyacinth : Sport, Game, Play

I believe that the undefined purple flowers, similar to the Common Hyacinth ( Hyacinthus orientalis ), may be present due to the confusion regarding Shakespeare’s “crow-flowers.” However, I believe the hyacinth’s appearance is more symbolic. I will provide a subsequent post to further explain my conjecture in the image to the right.

Victorian Meaning of Iris : Message

Based on the stem’s texture and tonal coloration, I believe that Millais has depicted both the English Iris ( Iris latifolia ) and the Yellow Flag Iris ( Iris pseudacorus ). In further support of the yellow flag iris identification, it is known to be commonly found along a water source (Ellacombe 101).

As the Victorian meaning implies, the iris was named after the messenger of the Olympians, who is traditionally believed to assist young girls into their afterlife after irises have been placed on their grave. The Pre-Raphaelites also used the iris to symbolize “lost love and silent grief” (Mancoff 16). In addition, according to French mythology, purple irises were believed to have turned from gold to purple as a symbol of the mourning of Jesus (Mancoff 34).

Victorian Meaning of Jasmine : Amiability

If I am correct in identifying the pink underside of the flowers in the detail image to the right as White Jasmine ( Jasminum polyanthum) , then this will not be Millais’s first time painting jasmine. As Millais depicted in The Bridesmaid (1851), brides of the Victorian Era wore jasmine as a symbol of “wedded bliss” (Mancoff 26). Though I have yet to determine the symbolic meaning that could have been meant by Millais in Ophelia , I hope to update this as my studies continue.

Victorian Meaning of Marigold : Grief

“ Marigolds on death-beds blowing.” Shakespeare, Two Noble Kinsmen

Yet another unconfirmed identification is the yellow flower to the left of the Red Poppy. I am confident that this is the Marsh Marigold ( Caltha palustris ).

“The wild Marsh Marigold shines like fire in swamps and hollows gray.” Lord Alfred Tennyson, The May Queen

The marigold is known as the flower of the dead in Mexico and a symbolic funeral offering in Ancient Greece (Foley 111). Similarly, through art and literature, the marigold has been associated with “death, funerals, resurrection, and hope” (Thomas and Faircloth 222).

“The purple violets and marigolds Shall, as a carpet, hang upon thy grave While summer days do last.” Shakespeare, Pericles, Prince of Tyre

Victorian Meaning of Burning Nettle : Slander

The leaves of the Stinging Nettle ( Urtica dioica ) are present between the willow branches of Millais’s Ophelia . Though this plant’s qualities may be foreboding of pain (i.e. Urtica is derived from uro , meaning “to burn”), there is a fascinating history regarding the use of nettles as durable thread and as a food source (Ellacombe 187). As appetizing as “nettle porridge” may sound, in both Millais’s painting and Shakespeare’s literary reference, nettles represent pain and slander.

Victorian Language of Pansies : Love in Vain

Traditional herbalists credited the Pansy , also known as Heart’s Ease , as an anodyne for heart pain (Mancoff 78). The pansies depicted in Millais’s painting resemble the coloring and form of a Wild Pansy ( Viola tricolor ).

It is thought that the name “pansy” is derived from the French word pensées , meaning thoughts (Ellacombe 207).

“And there is pansies , that’s for thoughts.” Hamlet , Act IV Scene V

Shakespeare’s often referred to this flower by its clearly symbolic name, Love-in-idleness .

“Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wounds And maidens call it Love-in-Idleness .” Shakespeare, Midsummers Night’s Dream

Victorian Meaning of Flos Adonis : Painful Recollections

According to Tate Gallery , the small red flower seems to reflect a blooming Pheasant’s Eye ( Adonis annua ), also known as the Adonis’ Flower . Unfortunately, they do not go into further detail regarding the reasoning behind their identification. My studies on the mythos and symbology of the Pheasant’s Eye continues.

The Adonis’ Flower was named after Adonis, the mortal lover of Aphrodite. While weeping over Adonis’s dying body, Aphrodite’s tears and Adonis’s blood formed the anemone flower. Though the Adonis’ Flower we know today is not an anemone, they are both members of the Buttercup family ( Ranunculaceae) .

Victorian Meaning of Purple Loosestrife : Pretension

Millais portrayed the native plant purple loosestrife ( Lythrum salicaria ) in reference to Gertrude’s description of the “long purples” featured in Ophelia’s drowning. However, there has been a debate regarding the correct flower that Shakespeare was referring to. Ellacombe defended the popular theory that the “long purples” were most likely any of the three common purple orchids found in England’s meadows: the green-winged orchid ( Orchis morio ), early marsh-orchid ( Dactylorhiza incarnata ) and early purple orchid ( Orchis maculata ) (Ellacombe 157). He further argued that their appendage-like pale roots fit Long Purple’s alternative name: Dead Men’s Fingers .

“Our cold maids do Dead Men’s Fingers call them.” Hamlet , Act IV Scene VII

For Millais, the confusion of this reference may have been circumstantial as long purples were referred to as the purple loosestrife found in the marshes of the English countryside during the Victorian Era. For example, John Clare writes of the “tufty spikes” that are characteristic of loosestrife, rather than meadow orchids (Ellacombe 158).

“Gay Long-purples with its tufty spike; he’d wade o’e shoes to reach it in the dyke.” John Clare, Village Minstrel (1821)

Similarly, Millais’s setting is reminiscent of the botanical positioning in Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem A Dirge :

“Round thee blow, self-pleached deep, Bramble Roses, faint and pale, And Long Purple s of the dale.” Lord Alfred Tennyson , A Dirge (1830)

A modern identification of Shakespeare’s “Dead Men’s Fingers” is given later.

Victorian Meaning of Ragged Robin : Wit

The Crow-Flower , or the Ragged Robin , was a popular Elizabethan garland component. In Herball, General Historie of Plants , Gerad notes how the Ragged Robin was used for “‘garlands and crowns, and to deck up gardens'” (Ellacombe 64). Furthermore, there is a significant amount of evidence showing that Shakespeare often referred to guidance of Gerad’s botany book.

“There with fantastic garlands did she come Of crowflowers , nettles, daisies, and long purples.” Hamlet , Act IV Scene VII

In Scotland, crow-flowers are actually referred to as wild hyacinth. However, as Ellacombe points out, Ophelia’s garland consists of summer flowering plants, whereas the Hyacinth blooms in the Spring. Additionally, the ragged robin is a wetland perennial.

Victorian Meaning of Red Poppy : Death 

The Red Poppy was a popular symbol amongst the Pre-Raphaelites to foreshow death of the subject or to represent deep sleep.

According to Roman Mythology, the goddess of fields and mother of Persephone, Ceres, adorned poppies to commemorate her daughter during winter (Mancoff 62).

Victorian Meaning of Rosemary : Remembrance

“Grow for two ends, it matter not at all, Be’t for my bridall or my buriall” Robert Herrick on the use of Rosemary

Though not depicted in Millais’s Ophelia , during Shakespeare’s time, rosemary was a highly appreciated herb and was commonly used in both weddings and funerals (Ellacombe 273.

“As for Rosemarine , I lett it run alle over my garden walls, not only because my bees love its but because tis the herb sacred to remembrance, and therefore to friendship; whence a sprig of it hath a dumb language that maketh it the chose emblem at our funeral wakes and in our buriall grounds.” Sir Thomas More on his great admiration of Rosemary

“There’s rosemary , that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember.” Hamlet, Act IV Scene V

Victorian Meaning of Rue : Repentance

“There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me — we may call it herb of grace o’ Sundays. Oh, you must wear your rue with a difference.” Hamlet , Act IV Scene V

The bitterness of Rue , or Herb of Grace , is said to the reasoning behind its association with the phrase “to rue” or to feel remorse for something. Thus, rue came to symbolize the act of repenting (Ellacombe, 1896).

Victorian Meaning of Saffron Crocus : Mirth

Though I have no other account of this, I believe the purple flower with three long stamens in the detail image below to be Saffron Crocus . This depiction seems to be lacking the usual three crimson stigmata, but the grasslike leaves further support my attempt at botanical identification. I choose to believe that the stigmata were already harvested for seasoning or dye.

In addition, Millais may have been familiar with the symbolic usage of this plant in many of Shakespeare’s plays: Winter’s Tale , Comedy of Errors , Tempest and All’s Well That Ends Well .

Victorian Meaning of Violet : Faithfulness

From chastity to youthful death, Violets are laden with symbology (Tate). Their association with early death may be reflective of their short-lived flowering season that ends “before the full beauty of summer had come,” as shown in Henry Vaughan’s poem Daphnis (Ellacombe 333).

“So Violets , so doth the primrose fall At once the spring’s pride and its funeral, Such easy sweets get off still in their prime, And stay not here, to wear the soil of Time; While courser Flow’rs (which none would miss, if past; To scorching Summers, and cold Autumns last.” Henry Vaughan, Daphnis

Or when Laertes’ hopes that violets grow from Ophelia’s grave:

“Lay her i’ the earth, And from her fair and unpolluted flesh May Violets spring!” Hamlet , Act V Scene I

Shakespeare introduces the language of violets as Ophelia’s brother, Laertes, compares the fragility and transiency of a violet’s bloom to the falsity and brevity of Hamlet’s affection towards her:

“For Hamlet and the trifling of his favor, Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood, A violet in the youth of primy nature, Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting, The perfume and suppliance of a minute. No more.” Hamlet , Act I Scene III

Though Ophelia states that there are no violets to give, Millais’s Ophelia wears a necklace of what appears to be English Violets ( Viola odorata ).

“I would give you some Violets , but they wither all when my father died.” Hamlet , Act IV Scene V

Victorian Meaning of Cuckoo Plant : Ardor

Though Ellacombe credits Shakespeare’s “long purples” reference to the purple orchids found in the local woodlands of England, the author of Flowers from Stratford-on-Avon (1852), Paul Jerrard, argues that Shakespeare undoubtedly is referring to the Wild Arum ( Arum maculatum ) (Ellacombe 157). Even the Director of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Dr. Levi Fox, was in agreement with Jerrard’s conjecture (Quealy 198).

I believe this assumption can hold up merely based off the the rotting finger coloration and symbolic insinuation of the genital-like spadix (stem of flowers) emerging from the spathe (leaf-like feature of the Araceae family). Consequently, the Wild Arum was also referred to as Lords-and-Ladies . This botanical symbology may align with theory that the floral drowning scene was also emblematic of the “deflowering” of Ophelia.

“That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, But our cold maids do “ dead men’s fingers ” call them.” Hamlet , Act IV Scene VII

Victorian Meaning of Fuller’s Teasel : Misanthropy

Wild Teasels ( Dipsacus fullonum ), or fuller’s teasel, were most likely present along the Hogsmill River where Millais painted Ophelia’s scene. I do not believe this had a purely symbolic reason for being present, rather the incorporation of the wild teasels were a part of keeping true to nature.

Victorian Meaning of Willow : Mourning: Forsaken Love

The willow that Millais depicts and that Gertrude refers to in Hamlet is most likely the Crack Willow ( Salix fragilis ). The Weeping Willow that often accompanies Ophelia in other paintings was not actually present in England during the Elizabethan Era. Fortunately for Millais, the stream embankments contained a cracked willow fitted with “pendant boughs.”

“There is a willow grows aslant a brook That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.” Hamlet, Act IV Scene VII

Barnard, George. Drawing from Nature: A Series of Progressive Instructions in Sketching, to Which Are Appended Lectures on Art Delivered at Rugby School . Forgotten Books, 2017.

Belanger, Michelle. Walking the Twilight Path: A Gothic Book of the Dead .

Ellacombe, Henry. The Plant-Lore and Garden-Craft of Shakespeare . London, W. Satchell and Co, 1896.

Foley, Daniel. Herbs for Use and for Delight: An Anthology from the Herbarist . Dover Publications, 1974.

Graves, Robert. The Common Asphodel: Collected Essays on Poetry, 1922-1949 . Haskell House, 1970.

Greenway, Kate. The Language of Flowers . London, 1884.

Mancoff, Debra. The Pre-Raphaelite Language of Flowers . Prestel, 2012.

Millais, John. The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais . London, Methuen & Co., 1899.

“ Ranunculus penicillatus .” Online Atlas of the British and Irish Flora .

Riggs, Terry. “ Ophelia .” Tate , Feb. 1998.

“ Species list for Millais’ Ophelia anyone? .” Plant Curator , 15 April 2014.

Thomas, Vivan and Nicki Faircloth. Shakespeare’s Plants and Gardens: A Dictionary . The Arden Shakespeare, 2016.

Quealy, Gerit. Botanical Shakespeare: An Illustrated Compendium of All the Flowers, Fruits, Herbs, Trees, Seeds, and Grasses Cited by the World’s Greatest Playwright . New York, Harper Collins Publishers, 2017.

Jesse Campbell 

I am an artist influenced by the ethereal realm of the pre-raphaelites, victorian craftsmanship, and the symbolic language of flowers. in my photography, i blend digital and 19th-century processes to paint with light. while i practice self-portraiture, my love for gardening and my experiences in animal rehabilitation greatly influence the narrative woven into my creations. currently, i am delving into the art of flower making and exploring the folk art technique of spun cotton. , recent posts.

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