This is Ophelia
a painting by John Everett Millais
about Ophelia from Shakespeare's play
Hamlet
Distressed after Prince Hamlet
has broken their engagement
and killed her father
Ophelia wanders the countryside
looking for flowers
and falls into a stream and drowns
Millais was just 22
and the most radical painter of his day
He had spent five summer months
sitting by the Hogsmill River in Surrey
painting every
leaf and ripple from nature
In the winter of 1852
In his studio
he painted in the central character
Millais's model
posed in a bath
is a young artist and poet called
Elizabeth Siddal
What was Siddal
thinking while she lay still for so many hours?
Surely the two artists talked
Millais's easel was positioned close by
He must have leaned in to study the change
in Siddal's hair
as it passed under the water
The gleams on the silver dress, each
individual lash
as he painted
the candles keeping the water warm
died out
Millais failed to notice
and Siddal remained
still in the cooling water
when she became ill with cold
Millais was blamed
In the future
historians find parallels
between the drowning Ophelia
and Siddal's submission
to the chilling bath
Siddal could not have known
how entangled her own
story would become with the painting
This is the story of the real Ophelia
Elizabeth Siddal was 19 years old
training at an art school
and working as a seamstress
She was not beautiful by Victorian standards
but her boyish appearance
and abundant coppery hair
attracted a group of progressive artists
called the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
Several of them hired her as a model
which brought her closer to the art world
Siddal's own career as an artist progressed
She was tutored by the charismatic
Dante Gabrielle Rossetti
and the art critic John Ruskin
proclaimed her a genius
and bought all of her work
Women artists did not have the same access
to models as men did so she painted herself
Victorian society looked down
upon working women
especially artist models
Warnings of what might happen
to these women appeared
in popular culture
They were depicted as fallen
women who often came to tragic ends
frequently drowning in a polluted river
Millais saw a parallel
between these images
and Shakespeare's Ophelia
who is rejected after Hamlet accuses her
falsely of being impure
Millais underlined the innocence
of his heroine
by changing the polluted city river
to a country stream
Ophelia's gown
associated with her betrayed marriage
is at odds with
the natural world around her
Her hair on the other hand
has come loose
and flows freely with the current
For Millais
nature represented truth and redemptive
cycles of life and death
Siddal and Rossetti
married eight years later
The delay may have been her choice
It meant surrendering her independence
It would be another 20 years
before the law allowed
wives to keep their own earnings
And like all Victorian women
marriage faced Siddal
with the dangers of pregnancy and birth
before modern medicine
A miscarriage affected
her physical and mental health
and not long after at only 32
she died from an overdose
of the opiate laudanum
Afterwards a bereft Rosetti
painted Siddal
at the moment of death
He remembers her as his muse
The object of desire
in the decades that followed
the public's
imagination entwined Ophelia and Siddal
history typed them
both as victims of love
mentally fragile
and their deaths were
assumed to be suicide
And while Siddal's death
became legendary
her poems
drawings and watercolors
her courage were forgotten
The painting came to represent
the feminine myth
that she and Millais have challenged
And Ophelia has inspired countless
other images of fateful women adrift
Siddal is remembered in this passive role
whose purpose was to inspire men
not to aspire
to greatness herself
As one art historian put it
she is framed forever by that bath