Ophelia

What you are looking at

A young woman lies on her back in a slow English stream, her arms open, her palms turned up, her lips parted as if she is singing. Her dress, heavy with water, is beginning to pull her under. Around her the riverbank is painted leaf by leaf: a willow leaning over the water, nettles, meadowsweet, a dog rose, and in the reeds a robin. Flowers drift from her hand and across the surface.

The longer you look, the stranger the balance becomes. The landscape is painted with almost scientific sharpness, while the figure seems suspended between floating and sinking. Ophelia is not struggling. In Shakespeare's words she is "incapable of her own distress", and Millais makes that the subject: a person absorbed into nature at the moment of death.

The story from Hamlet

In Hamlet (Act 4, Scene 7), Queen Gertrude reports Ophelia's death. Driven mad by grief after Hamlet kills her father Polonius, Ophelia climbs a willow to hang garlands of wildflowers, a branch breaks, and she falls into the brook. For a while her clothes hold her up and she sings old songs, until they grow heavy and drag her down. Shakespeare never shows the drowning on stage, which left painters free to imagine it.

Millais painted the moment of Gertrude's speech almost literally: the willow "aslant a brook", the garlands, the singing, the spreading dress.

How Millais made it

Millais was twenty-two and a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who rejected studio conventions in favor of painting directly from nature in bright, exact detail. He painted the background first, outdoors on the Hogsmill River near Ewell in Surrey, working from about July to November 1851, sometimes eleven hours a day. He complained in letters about flies, wind and the threat of being blown into the water.

The figure was painted that winter in his London studio. His model was Elizabeth Siddal, later the wife of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and a painter and poet herself. She posed in a bath of water kept warm by lamps underneath. According to the story told by Millais's son, the lamps went out, Siddal stayed in the cold water without complaint and fell seriously ill, and her father demanded Millais pay the doctor's bill. Millais worked over a white ground that was still wet, a Pre-Raphaelite technique that makes the colors glow like enamel.

What do the flowers in the Ophelia painting mean?

The flowers are a reading in themselves. Some come from Shakespeare's text and some Millais added for their symbolic value in the Victorian language of flowers:

• Poppies: death and sleep.
• Violets: a chain of them hangs around her neck; in the play Ophelia says the violets "withered all" when her father died. They stand for faithfulness and early death.
• Daisies: innocence.
• Pansies: love in vain.
• Forget-me-nots: remembrance.
• Roses, near her cheek and on the bank: youth and love. Willow, nettle and meadowsweet suggest forsaken love, pain and futility.

Look in the reeds on the left bank for a shape that some viewers read as a skull. It is not certain Millais intended it, but the possibility has become part of the painting's legend.

Reception and legacy

Ophelia was shown at the Royal Academy in 1852. Critics were divided: some found the botanical detail obsessive and the figure unflattering, others saw it as a new kind of truth to nature. Its reputation only grew. It was bought by the Tate's founder Henry Tate and given to the nation in 1894, and it is now one of the most visited and reproduced paintings in Britain.

Its image of a drowned or drowning woman among flowers became a long-lived motif, echoed in photography, film and the visual language of dark academia. Compare it with John William Waterhouse's The Lady of Shalott, another doomed heroine on the water, or with Millais's own later The Martyr of Solway.

Details most viewers miss

• The robin. Perched on a branch at the upper left, a robin may allude to Ophelia's song in the play, "For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy".
• The dress. Millais bought an antique embroidered gown, decorated with silver thread, for Siddal to wear in the bath; he recorded paying four pounds for it.
• The water vole. Millais originally painted a water vole swimming near the bank. A friend could not tell what it was, so he painted it out.
• The pose. Ophelia's open arms and upturned palms echo images of saints and martyrs, giving a secular death the look of a religious vision.

Where is Ophelia today?

Ophelia is in the collection of Tate Britain on Millbank in London (accession N01506), usually displayed in the galleries of Victorian art. Entry to the permanent collection is free. The canvas is smaller than many people expect, a little over a meter wide, which makes the density of its detail even more remarkable up close.