The story behind the painting
Ophelia
Millais surrounds the drowning Ophelia with a riverbank whose intricate beauty sharpens the tragedy.
- This is Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, drowning in a flower-filled stream.
- Her face turns upward between the reeds.
- Dense reeds crowd the left riverbank.
- Her silver dress spreads across the water.
- Bright flowers drift beside her lowered hand.
- Wild roses bloom above her floating body.
- The flowers keep blooming around a life slipping away.
Ophelia is a painting of 1851–2 by John Everett Millais of Shakespeare’s Ophelia floating in a flower-strewn stream just before she drowns; it belongs to Tate and hangs at Tate Britain in London.
What is happening in Millais’s Ophelia?
At first the scene seems peaceful: a young woman floats in a stream, her pale dress spread across the water and plants crowding the banks. But this is Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, drowning amid that abundance of life.
Millais holds the scene in a troubling stillness. Ophelia’s mouth is open and her palms turn upward, while the dress spreads across the surface. The water supports the figure for a moment even as the scene leads toward her death.
Tate’s catalogue entry places the scene in Act IV, Scene vii of Hamlet. Driven out of her mind after her father is killed by Hamlet, her lover, Ophelia falls into a stream when a branch breaks as she climbs to hang up her garlands. In Queen Gertrude’s account her spreading clothes hold her up for a while as she sings snatches of old tunes, until her waterlogged dress pulls her down ‘to muddy death’. (Tate)
Where did Millais paint Ophelia?
The landscape was not a loose backdrop. Millais worked outdoors beside the Hogsmill River near Ewell, studying the bank with almost stubborn attention. Leaves, grasses, water plants, and mud receive the kind of focus another painter might reserve only for a face.
Millais began the background in July 1851 at Ewell in Surrey, painting it from close observation of nature as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s aims demanded. In a letter quoted in Tate’s catalogue entry he complained that the flies of Surrey were ‘more muscular’ than elsewhere, that he had been threatened with a magistrate’s summons for trespassing and destroying the hay, and that he risked being blown into the water. (Tate)
He is said to have worked beside the Hogsmill River for up to 11 hours a day, six days a week, over five months. When the weather turned windy and snowy in November, he had a hut built from four hurdles covered in straw so that he could keep painting. (Wikipedia)
That equal attention to figure and landscape is central to the painting’s Pre-Raphaelite character. Bright color and closely observed detail give the natural setting a force of its own. Tragedy unfolds among plants that continue to grow.
Millais was only 22. Born in Southampton in 1829, he had entered the Royal Academy Schools at the age of eleven, the youngest student ever admitted, and there met William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with whom he founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. (Wikipedia)
Who was the model for Ophelia?
Millais painted the figure separately in his studio, where Elizabeth Siddal posed in a bath of water. The finished image joins that carefully arranged pose to the outdoor landscape. What looks effortless depends on two different kinds of observation.
The model was Elizabeth Siddal, a favourite of the Pre-Raphaelites who later married Rossetti. Tate records that she posed over four months in a bath of water kept warm by lamps underneath. When the lamps once went out she caught a severe cold, and her father threatened legal action until Millais agreed to pay the doctor’s bills. (Tate)
The dress was a real antique. In March 1852 Millais wrote that he had bought ‘a really splendid lady’s ancient dress’, flowered all over in silver embroidery, to paint for Ophelia, and that it had cost him four pounds, ‘old and dirty as it is’. (Tate)
What do the flowers in Ophelia mean?
The flowers carry meanings as well as color. Tate associates the poppy with death, daisies with innocence, and pansies with love in vain. These small details connect the natural setting to Ophelia’s story without reducing the whole bank to a single symbol.
Tate’s entry reads most of the plants as symbols. The roses near Ophelia’s cheek and dress, and the field rose on the bank, may recall her brother Laertes calling her ‘rose of May’. Willow, nettle and daisy are associated with forsaken love, pain and innocence; the violets she wears in a chain around her neck can stand for faithfulness, chastity or the death of the young; and forget-me-nots float on the water. (Tate)
The painting holds observation and literary imagination together. The water can be studied and the plants can be named, while the figure belongs to a tragedy. Their meeting makes the scene both tangible and unsettling.
How was Ophelia received, and where is it now?
When it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1852, the response was mixed. A critic in The Times found it perverse to plunge Ophelia into ‘a weedy ditch’, and even John Ruskin, who supported Millais and found the technique exquisite, questioned the choice of a Surrey landscape. (Wikipedia)
The dealer Henry Farrer had already bought the picture from Millais on 10 December 1851, for 300 guineas. It then passed to the collector B. G. Windus, an avid buyer of Pre-Raphaelite art, who sold it on in 1862 for 748 guineas. (Wikipedia)
Ophelia was part of Sir Henry Tate’s original gift to the Tate Gallery, and the museum’s credit line records it as presented by him in 1894. Tate’s collection record lists it on display at Tate Britain. (Tate)
Its image has travelled far. It shaped Ophelia’s death in Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film of Hamlet, Kylie Minogue mimics the pose in the video for Nick Cave’s ‘Where the Wild Roses Grow’, Lars von Trier evokes it in the prologue of his 2011 film Melancholia, and in 2025 Taylor Swift referenced it on the cover of her album The Life of a Showgirl. (Wikipedia)
The open mouth and hands keep our attention on a life not yet entirely stilled. The surrounding beauty does not remove the grief. It makes the contrast between the figure and the living bank harder to forget.
The details at a glance
Sources and further reading
- Ophelia — Tate
- Artist biography: John Everett Millais (Wikipedia, English)
- Ophelia (Wikipedia, English)