By Rolf Harris

“Ophelia” by John Everett Millais (1851-2. Oil on canvas, 30 x 44 in. London, Tate Gallery) is a most skilful painting.

Ophelia is a character from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. In the play, Hamlet’s mother, the Queen, describes how Ophelia [who by that time had lost sanity because Hamlet had killed her father, the Lord Chamberlain] collected a garland of crow flowers, nettles and daisies, and while chambering out on a branch to hang them on a tree, she fell into the brook below. Her clothes spread out and kept her floating for a while, and she, quite unaware of the danger she was in, sang snatches of old ballads. Eventually her clothes became heavy with water and pulled her down to muddy death.

The painter captures this feeling beautifully – the fact that Ophelia is unaware of any approaching disaster. You can almost hear the childish words of the song, and she has a vacant, faraway look in her eyes. The casual, relaxed pose of the hands also shows that she is completely at ease.

The painting of this picture took a long time and was done in two parts. Millais included many of the flowers and plants mentioned in the play, quite a few of which symbolized special things at that time. The pansies, seen floating in the water, mean both thought and love in vain. The chain of violets around Ophelia’s neck refer to a line Ophelia says in the play about the violets that ‘withered all, when my father died.’ Violets, to the Victorians, symbolized faith, chastity and death of the young. There are roses in the picture, which refer to Ophelia’s brother Laertes, calling her a ‘Rose of May.’

Millais chose all sorts of other plants not mentioned in the play for their symbolism. Poppies, you can find, symbolized death; meadowsweet meant uselessness; pheasant’s eye and fritillary, the spotted flowers floating between the dress and the water’s edge, both meant sorrow.

All the plants are beautifully painted with great botanical accuracy, as was all the background. Everything except the figure was painted during the summer of 1851. Millais’s friends, the Lempriere family, had a house near Ewell in Surrey, and there on the bank of the Hogsmill River, the artist worked every fine day for about three and half months, painstakingly recording the scene.

When it came to painting the figure of Ophelia, Millais moved back to his studio, set up a bath full of water, and employed a model called Lizzy Siddal to pose for him. From what we can gather, she lay fully clothed in the water, daily for some four months, while he meticulously recorded every detail of her face and hands. He specially bought an antique silver embroidered gown to depict in the painting. It must have been a particularly unpleasant task. Every day she had to get back into the bath and lie with ears under the water, and be prepared to stay still there most of the day, with hands and face in a certain fixed position. To keep her warm, Millais had lamps lighted under the bath, but such was the single-mindedness of the painter in him that on several occasions the lamps went out unnoticed, the water got slowly cold. Her father had to threaten Millais with legal action before he would pay her doctor’s bills.

When you look at the finished picture it is hard to believe that the two parts of the painting were done at different times, they are so skillfully married together. It is also hard to believe how anyone could have spent so much time and money on painting the one work. The critic John Ruskin described it as ‘The loveliest English landscape, haunted by sorrow.’