The painting of Ophelia floating in the water gave me the creeps when I was young. The origin of the story is bad enough. It comes from Hamlet.
SHAKESPEARE'S PLAY HAMLET
She is his girlfriend, would-be fiancee. Whilst he is suicidal ('to be or not to be') she is the one who does the deed. After Hamlet has killed her father Polonius, who was hiding behind a curtain.
Does that remind you of Romeo and Juliet and their double suicide? I never noticed the resemblance, the parallels of the plots before.
To go back to the romantic yet unnerving painting, only years later did I see the picture again in the Guildhall in London. I also remember the story of the wife or girlfriend of the poet who buried his poems in her grave and dug the poems up again later, only to find that her hair had grown after she was buried. Spooky.
Two stories about the same woman.
I saw Ophelia at the free Guildhall exhibition on the ground floor. The ground floor gallery is above the Roman floor excavations, which you can see through a window (though you pay to go inside to the exhibition.
The picture of Ophelia was an unexpected bonus. I was gratified to find out that the girl portrayed was merely posing. However, the artist's model was in poor mental and physical shape and caught Pneumonia. I don't know what posing, still, as the dead body of a suicide does to your thought process, but it is not exactly a recipe for positive thinking.
The young artist's model later died of an overdose.
HAIR
What of the growing hair story? Years ago I read that a dead body dehydrates and shrinks, so that the nails and hair appear to have grown. Now, there's another theory. The poet was not present. The person he paid or encouraged to retrieve the poems made up the story for notoriety. Perhaps he was encouraged by the transfixed horror of everybody he told about how he dug up the coffin and pulled out the poems. What could he add to continue to hold the listener's rapt attention. Another equally plausible explanation.
If you want to make yourself miserable, you can worry about the appalling way painters and their models lived, the short lives of people in Victorian times, the prevalence of suicide in olden times and still today.
Alternatively you can cheer yourself up by thinking, that's just a pretence, a painter's model. The poor girl (poor financially?) gained immortality as his model. Today we have modern plumbing with hot and cold running water.
What of the painter Millais?
MILLAIS, THE PRE-RAPHAELITE PAINTER
Millais founded the pre-Raphaelites from his home in Gower Street in London, England. His equally well-known paintings included The Princes In The Tower which is in the Art Gallery of Royal Holloway College.
Also visit Guildhall.
Princes in the TowerI like the way the princes are looking in opposite directions. Watching out for danger. Like meerkats.
This is his portrait of her, as Beata Beatrix, in the Tate Britain Gallery.
You can see the Ophelia picture now at the Tate Gallery. Tate Britain, not to be confused with Tate Modern. Famous paintings tend to move about elusively. Online, you can usually catch these out of copyright pictures somewhere. If you can get a ticket, and live in a city where you can go out, protecting yourself and others with a mask, aren't you the lucky one. Enjoy.
Useful Websites and links
#art #painting #elizabethsiddal#tate #artist @ Tate Gallery
About the Author
Angela Lansbury is a travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. She is a member of five Toastmasters International speakers' clubs, one in London, three in Singapore, including Braddell Heights Advanced, currently meeting online, and one permanently online club. BHA meets the first Wednesday evening each month, and the third Saturday afternoon on app learncool.
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