Ophelia (detail) by Sir John Everett Millais (1851)
Tate Britain, London
Whenever I’m in London, I go to see Ophelia floating “mermaid-like” in her brilliant green brook, weirdly and forcefully alive at the moment of her death. In Interred With Their Bones, I gave Kate my own feelings about Millais’s exquisite painting:
Over a fireplace large enough to burn a sequoia hung a painting that glowed green and gold in the strange light. A woman in a long brocade gown floated on her back in a high-banked stream, her face pale, the water scattered with red and purple flowers. Ophelia, painted at the moment of her death by Sir John Everett Millais.
It was an oil painting, not a print, and it was exquisite, right down to the oddly shaped and intricately carved gold frame. So exquisite that for a moment I wondered if Athenaide had somehow acquired the original.
“I have always loved this painting.”
I stepped forward, blinking. So had I. She – I always thought of the painting as Ophelia herself – was one of the great masterpieces of Pre-Raphaelite art. But she was supposed to be in the Tate Britain Museum, in London. I knew that. Since beginning Hamlet, I’d gone to see her often, walking through the leafy shade along the Thames, ducking into the long room the color of roses at twilight where she held watery court between two paintings of women in startling blue gowns. Ophelia herself was strangely colorless, already fading to transparency, but the world in which she floated shone a brilliant, defiant green.
—Interred With Their Bones
Here’s Gertrude describing Ophelia’s death:
There, on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds
Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide
And mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up;
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and endued unto
that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
—Hamlet (Act 4, Scene 7)
Want to know more?
Khan Academy’s Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker talk about the painting in a brief video:
More Images from Interred With Their Bones