Ophelia

Inspired by a scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia is the work that made John Everett Millais and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood famous, a picture of the drowning Ophelia surrounded by the exacting botanical detail the movement prized. Millais painted the riverside vegetation from nature over months, and worked the floating figure from the model Elizabeth Siddall, posed in a warm bath in his studio. Part of the Tate’s collection since the founding Henry Tate gift of 1894, the canvas remains among the most beloved images in British art, admired as much for its studied realism as for its strange, luminous melancholy.