Ophelia (Painting)

Ophelia is an oil painting by Sir John Everett Millais, completed between 1851 and 1852, depicting the scene of Ophelia’s drowning from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. The work exemplifies the Pre-Raphaelite principles of fidelity to nature and meticulous detail and is part of the Tate collection.

Subject and Literary Source

The painting is based on Act IV Scene 7 of Hamlet, in which Ophelia, while gathering flowers and weaving a garland from willow branches, falls into a stream and slowly drowns.

Ophelia is the daughter of Polonius and sister of Laertes, living in the Danish court in William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet. In the play, the young woman, who is in love with Prince Hamlet, descends into mental collapse following her father’s death and Hamlet’s withdrawal. In the artwork she is portrayed as obedient, innocent and emotionally fragile. After her father’s death she has lost her sanity.

The willow tree, the leaves reflected on the glassy surface of the water, and the floral garland Ophelia has prepared are all described in the relevant scene. In Millais’s interpretation, this figure serves as an allegorical representation of both personal tragedy and dissolution within nature.

John Everett Millais’s painting Ophelia (Archive)

Production Process

John Everett Millais created the painting Ophelia in two different locations between 1851 and 1852. The landscape was painted en plein air along the banks of the Hogsmill River near the village of Ewell in Surrey, while the figure was painted in his studio on Gower Street in London. The artist spent long hours each day observing nature directly and continued his work for approximately five months.

The model for the figure was Elizabeth Siddall. To depict her submerged in water, Millais had her pose in a bathtub filled with water in the studio. She wore a heavy, silver-embroidered dress, which enhanced the realistic effect of the garment’s weight as it sank in the water.

Technical Features

Technically, Millais used a double-layered canvas, preparing the surface first with a size solution and then with layers of lead white and zinc white. Each day he marked the area he intended to paint with white paint and worked on this “wet white ground” using single-layered, pure pigments. The pigments used included lead white, ultramarine ash, chrome yellow, cobalt blue and bone black—new chemical pigments of the period.

Light, color saturation and reflection effects were derived directly from observations of nature. The reverse side of the canvas was covered with a second layer of fabric for protection.

Composition

In the painting Ophelia floats on her back on the water’s surface, with her head, neck, chest and hands visible above the waterline. The volume of her heavy, silver-embroidered dress accelerates her sinking. The open position of her hands and the convergence of her fingertips suggest surrender and submission to fate. The natural background is a detailed observation of the Hogsmill River bank.

Ophelia (Rawpixel)

Flowers and Symbolism

The symbolism in Millais’s painting merges botanical references from Shakespeare’s Hamlet with Pre-Raphaelite naturalism. The artist painted each plant in the work directly from nature, observing them in the Ewell area; even broken, withered or decaying leaves are rendered with precision.

The plants depicted include those mentioned in Act IV when Ophelia gathers flowers: willow, daisy, rosemary and violet, as well as additional flowers not mentioned in the play, such as forget-me-not and poppy.

Each plant carries specific symbolic meaning. Violets signify fidelity and death, poppies represent death and unconsciousness, daisies stand for purity, and rosemary for remembrance. The forget-me-not symbolizes love and memory, while aquatic plants evoke the serenity of death.

Moreover, the painting constructs meaning through the formal relationships of the flowers as well as their species. The fully bloomed red hawthorn flower symbolizes Ophelia’s escalating mental turmoil, the woodruff represents the entanglement of healing and madness, and the gold of the immortal flower symbolizes the character’s immortality. Daisies are interpreted as signs of purity, while mayflowers indicate the loss of reason. Cherry blossoms evoke the idea of accepting death while alive, and blue speedwell and herb-germander symbolize the struggle for self-care.

The painting Ophelia occupies a pivotal intersection of literature, direct observation of nature and symbolic narrative in 19th-century British art. Millais’s work does not portray Shakespeare’s tragic heroine merely as a character in a play but explores themes of death, nature and the disintegration of the human soul. The production process reflects the technical precision and commitment to direct observation characteristic of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. In these respects, Ophelia stands as one of the key examples in 19th-century art illustrating the relationship between nature and humanity, through its literary origins and artistic execution.