If you were to choose any British art gallery to walk into today, you would be sure to find one or more paint­ings by one or more artists belong­ing to the Pre-Raphaelite Broth­er­hood. The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of Eng­lish painters, poets, and art crit­ics, found­ed in 1848 by William Hol­man Hunt, John Everett Mil­lais, Dante Gabriel Ros­set­ti, and oth­ers, who sought to reform art and return it to the glo­ry days, as they saw it, of Ital­ian fif­teenth cen­tu­ry art. That peri­od of art, so-called Quat­tro­cen­to art, was char­ac­terised by abun­dant detail, colour and com­plex­i­ty; in the fol­low­ing cen­tu­ry, how­ev­er, artists – such as Raphael – were seen by the group as hav­ing a cor­rupt­ing influ­ence on art, ush­er­ing in the unnat­ur­al and stylised art of Man­ner­ism. Parmigianino’s Madon­na With The Long Neck (1540) is often used as an exam­ple of Man­ner­ism play­ing fast and loose with prop­er per­spec­tive, as I’m sure you can see.

Today, we’re look­ing at a clas­sic of the Pre-Raphaelites, name­ly Ophe­lia, the 1852 paint­ing by British artist Sir John Everett Mil­lais (and held in Tate Britain). Ophe­lia is of course a char­ac­ter from Shake­speare’s Ham­let, a Dan­ish noble­woman dri­ven mad by her love for Prince Ham­let and who ulti­mate­ly drowns in despair. Her drown­ing is not usu­al­ly seen onstage in the play, but mere­ly report­ed by Queen Gertrude who tells the audi­ence that Ophe­lia, out of her mind with grief, has fall­en from a wil­low tree over­hang­ing a brook. She lies in the water singing songs, as if unaware of her dan­ger (“inca­pable of her own dis­tress”), her clothes, trap­ping air and allow­ing her to stay afloat for a while (“Her clothes spread wide, / And, mer­maid-like, awhile they bore her up.”). But even­tu­al­ly, “her gar­ments, heavy with their drink, / Pul­l’d the poor wretch from her melo­di­ous lay” down “to mud­dy death”.

Mil­lais paints Ophe­lia in a pose with open arms and upward gaze in the man­ner of saints or mar­tyrs (they did love a trag­ic woman, the Pre-Raphs). In keep­ing with the tenets of the Pre-Raphaelites, he has used bright colours, with lots of detailed flo­ra and fideli­ty to nature. Despite its nom­i­nal Dan­ish set­ting, the land­scape has actu­al­ly come to be seen as quin­tes­sen­tial­ly Eng­lish (Ophe­lia was paint­ed along the banks of the Hogsmill Riv­er near Tol­worth in Sur­rey). The flow­ers shown float­ing on the riv­er were cho­sen to cor­re­spond with Shake­speare’s descrip­tion of Ophe­li­a’s gar­land.

Fun fact: at one point, Mil­lais had paint­ed a water vole pad­dling away near Ophe­lia, but changed his mind (prob­a­bly cor­rect­ly) after an acquain­tance mis­took it for a hare or rab­bit. Although ful­ly paint­ed over, a rough sketch of it still exists in a cor­ner of the can­vas hid­den by the frame, appar­ent­ly.