RALPH:  Gertrude’s description of Ophelia is strikingly visual – it’s as if she were painting the scene with words.

SARAH:  It’s fitting, therefore, that the image most of us have of Ophelia is from a famous painting by Sir John Everett Millais, which shows the mad Ophelia lying in the brook singing as she drowns.

RALPH:  Millais painted this scene in 1851, and he was obsessed with countless details, trying to make the painting as realistic as possible. He had a hut specially built for him on the bank of the Hogsmill river where he spent 6 days a week for 5 months painting the landscape background.

SARAH:  The water in the stream was obviously too cold for anyone to lie for any length of time, so Millais had his 19 year-old model come every day to his studio in London where she posed while lying in a bathtub suspended over an oil lamp to keep the water at a tolerable temperature.

RALPH:  Apparently the distracted artist let the lamp run out of oil from time to time, and his model caught a nasty cold.  The young woman’s father sent Millais an invoice of 50 pounds for medical bills.

SARAH:  Millais’s painting has become enormously influential for our understanding of Ophelia; although in some ways it’s made Ophelia even more difficult to truly understand – we so admire her portrait, but we forget that we still don’t know what’s caused her to slip into madness and death.