Ophelia

Ophelia is an oil painting on canvas by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais, made in 1851–1852, and held by Tate Britain in London, to which it came with the Henry Tate Gift in 1894.

The 76.2 × 111.8 cm canvas illustrates a scene that Shakespeare never puts on stage. In Act IV, Scene VII of Hamlet, Queen Gertrude tells Laertes how his sister, driven mad by grief after Hamlet killed her father Polonius, climbed a willow over a brook to hang garlands of wild flowers; a branch broke and she floated for a while, singing, until her waterlogged clothes pulled her down. Millais shows her just before she sinks, arms open and lips parted. Many of the flowers are those named in the play, others were chosen for their meanings in the Victorian language of flowers; the red poppy, absent from Shakespeare's text, stands for sleep and death.

In keeping with Pre-Raphaelite aims, Millais painted the landscape first, outdoors on the banks of the Hogsmill River in Surrey, working for up to 11 hours a day, six days a week, over about five months in 1851. Because of that span, flowers that bloom in different seasons appear side by side. He then painted the figure in his Gower Street studio, where Elizabeth Siddal posed fully clothed in a bath of water warmed by oil lamps, wearing an antique silver-embroidered dress he had bought for four pounds. When the lamps went out unnoticed she caught a severe cold, and her father demanded that Millais pay her doctor's bills. A water vole once paddling beside her was painted out.

Shown at the Royal Academy in 1852, the picture drew mixed reviews: a Times critic mocked Ophelia soused in a weedy ditch, and John Ruskin, while praising the technique, questioned the Surrey setting. The dealer Henry Farrer had bought it on 10 December 1851 for 300 guineas; it later passed through several collections before Henry Tate acquired it in 1892. It inspired the depiction of Ophelia's death in Laurence Olivier's 1948 film of Hamlet.