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.
