Song and Submergence: Millais’s Ophelia

The river receives her as a parish gathers to baptise sorrow, since a young woman—carried in a current the colour of bruised glass—lifts parted lips as if a final hymn still grazed the tongue while her palms, rising toward air, remember prayer even as water carries her onward. A theatre of plants presses close where loosestrife leans beneath willow and meadow-sweet threads the nettled edge, each leaf studied until daylight confers weight and shine, while the fallen bough behind her echoes the arc of the body the way syntax curls back to enclose an inward clause. John Everett Millais began his labour on the Hogsmill near Old Malden at the Ewell reach, working under an umbrella with the patience of a surveyor who trusts repeated measurements, until the bank and the stream accepted his presence; only after the place itself had earned its portrait did he return to a London studio and invite Elizabeth Siddal to inhabit an iron bathtub, where the body would complete the voice that Shakespeare had launched. The canvas bears the name Ophelia (1851–52), yet water pronounces the opening sentence as violets cling to the throat and a single red flower drifts beside the silvered gown like an ember that keeps the scene warm even as the skin chills.

Gertrude’s report offers the script—a willow grows aslant a brook, and a dress spreads mermaid-like before its fibres pull the singer under—and Millais sets the interval in which song and descent occupy the same breath, for the mouth keeps a thread of “melodious lay” while the gaze turns toward filtered daylight and the hands open with a release that painters once reserved for sanctity. Through alder that shelters ash, light spills in thin veils; around the figure, the code of flowers acquires the density of argument. Violets press close where fidelity and youthful death share a sign; a daisy meets the cheek and asserts an innocence already tested; forget-me-nots gather like vows carried on eddies; a poppy, drifting near the hem, proposes sleep with the gravity of oblivion. Victorian viewers, trained by parlour manuals and cemetery borders, recognized each emblem with fluent ease; Millais answers that literacy by furnishing the bank with species that allow Shakespeare’s garland to widen into a living page. Even the dark mass on the right arranges itself, for those who look long, into the curve of a skull, as if Hamlet’s later graveside meditation had sent a prologue to the river that bears her now.

Method governs the emotion because discipline drives illumination. Millais built the background from patience and glaze, laying lucid greens over a pale ground until horsetail stiffened among sedge and flowering rush lifted its pink flames at the margin, while reflections acquired a glassy pallor that belongs to English water in high summer. Letters from the bank speak of days that ran to eleven hours as gusts threatened to push easel and painter into the stream; his umbrella rattled, the midges drilled skin, and an improvised straw shelter extended the season. Only when the reeds and stones had secured their places did he turn to the figure, where Siddal reclined in a tub set over oil lamps so the water would keep a tolerable warmth while her posture, sustained across long sittings, opened her hands and throat to a ritual of surrender. He had just purchased, for four pounds, a silver-embroidered dress—“a really splendid lady’s ancient dress,” flowered from neck to hem—which he floated in the bath so that its threads might drink and return the light he had studied by the Hogsmill. The picture’s miracle rises from a ledger where welts and warnings, antique silk and a model’s endurance, enter as equal entries that together redeem the radiance on the surface.

The city that awaited the painting had learned a new grammar of spectacle beneath a vault of iron and plate glass, for the Great Exhibition of 1851 arranged engines whose pistons flashed, jewelry that staged imperial extraction, and instruments that measured the empire’s appetite; in such aisles, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood advanced another idea of progress grounded in truthful attention and sober moral purpose. Millais, who co-founded the circle in 1848 with Dante Gabriel Rossetti joined by William Holman Hunt, aligned his practice with Ruskin’s injunction to study nature leaf by leaf and to marry that study to subjects whose literature required gravity in place of formula. Ophelia follows that compact, since the freshwater bank—painted with the exactitude of a herbarium—answers manufacture with living particulars and proposes that poetry and paint can converse as equals whenever observation grants each of them a common ground.

The painter who could sustain such scrutiny rose early into mastery. Born in Southampton in 1829 to a family with Jersey roots, Millais entered the Royal Academy Schools at eleven as their youngest student of record, gathered prizes across his teens, and then faced a storm when Christ in the House of His Parents drew the ire of critics who bristled at a carpenter’s floor strewn with chips, at a boy who shows a cut hand as a sign, and at faces plainly modeled from London’s streets. Resistance shaped resolve; honours followed. A baronetcy came in 1885, and, in 1896, the Royal Academy chose him as president; when death arrived that same year, St Paul’s Cathedral received him beneath Wren’s dome. Across that arc, Ophelia stands near the centre as the picture that fuses youthful bravura with a severe ethic of attention, so the riverbank and the floating figure together announce an artist already alert to the century’s competing claims.

Private rooms, however, govern public careers in England as surely as galleries, and Millais’s story turns upon such rooms. During a Scottish summer devoted to torrents and rock—where he sketched John Ruskin against a landscape that seemed to pour through the picture plane—he fell in love with Ruskin’s wife, Euphemia Chalmers Gray. The ensuing annulment, entered on the ground of non-consummation, unsettled drawing rooms while it engaged the courts; in 1855 Effie married Millais, presided over a thriving household with eight children, and sat for portraits whose mingled tenderness and ceremony chart a marriage that joined domestic pleasure to high ambition. Later, another episode stitched the studio to the marketplace when an image of a grandchild blowing bubbles, initially titled A Child’s World, entered the orbit of Pears Soap; the public claimed the child as “Bubbles,” and the boy himself—William Milbourne James—grew into an admiral who carried that name through service. Fame, trade, and scandal plaited around Millais’s life, and Ophelia holds the poise that steadies such a braid.

The choice of Ophelia follows a logic that Millais had already tested in Mariana, for Shakespeare grants a heroine whose fate turns upon attention, and the painter answers with attention refined to austerity. By selecting the breath between hymn and immersion, he creates a paradox that sustains both levitation and descent, and he builds a surround where botany acquires rhetoric. The pansy’s thoughtful ache, the violet’s fidelity, the daisy’s embattled innocence, the nettle’s sting, and the poppy’s narcotic assurance together speak through petals that touch skin and water, so the figure sings through flowers even as the river lends her voice.

The model converts emblem into life. Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, born in Holborn in 1829 to Charles Crooke Siddall—whose Sheffield ties in cutlery shaped the household—and Elizabeth Evans, came of age in a capital where trade pressed against tight lodging, and her first wage arrived in a millinery shop off Cranbourne Alley. Walter Deverell, searching for a Viola for his Twelfth Night, recognized a presence that might carry a part and invited her to sit; Holman Hunt followed; the circle widened. Siddal entered that world with a reserve that guarded purposes deeper than posing, since she drew with a grave and intelligent line, wrote ballads whose refrains bind vow to dream, and signed E. E. Siddal as she navigated rooms where many men assessed women by faces while she insisted on the authority of her own hand. Ruskin, astonished by the clarity of her design, granted a stipend of £150 a year to support her production; Dante Gabriel Rossetti offered instruction while love gathered; William Michael Rossetti with Ford Madox Brown recorded her emergence as an artist whose images stand in independence from any painter’s praise.

During the winter of 1851–52, Siddal reclined in the bath where Millais completed Ophelia, with oil lamps warming the water beneath the iron tub and with the pose resumed across session after session until muscle memory allowed a saintlike release in the fingers. When a flame guttered during one sitting and the water cooled, she maintained the posture with a professional’s stern honour; illness followed, and her father demanded restitution, which Millais met by paying for medical treatment. Meanwhile the antique gown—flowered in silver embroidery from bodice to hem—carried a shimmer drawn from every lamp along its soaked folds, so that costume and current could speak together. The picture therefore rests upon an ethic that binds painter to model: he brings exactitude sharpened by exposure to weather and glare; she brings a discipline of body and breath that holds the image steady through winter water.

Siddal’s practice extended beyond the tub and into a studio of her own, where subjects from Arthurian legend received faces that refuse caricature and where women address fate with the gravity of witnesses in place of ornaments. She read Tennyson alongside the old ballads whose cadences return in her lyrics; she wrote and drew with a continuity that joins page to image. In May 1860, at St Clement’s in Hastings, she married Rossetti, and marriage promised anchorage. A child conceived in 1861 arrived lifeless and left a wound that laudanum eased before it mastered; on 11 February 1862, at the Chatham Place home, she died after an overdose, and a coroner’s jury gave accident as its verdict. The record that survives—art undertaken and exhibited, a marriage lived in the glare of a famous studio, a pregnancy lost, an early death—traces a course that gains warmth only when one imagines the rooms that heard her voice, saw her concentrate at a table, and received friends who recognized the steady mind that guided her drawing.

Grief then entered letters with a troubling afterlife. In October 1869, at Highgate, Rossetti’s agents opened the coffin to retrieve the manuscript of poems he had buried with her in 1862 as a gesture of renunciation; disinfection followed, then publication in 1870 under the title Poems, and debate has continued over the pieties and violations entailed in that act. Jan Marsh and other scholars register the episode with clear attention to documents, while the Rossetti Archive with the Cambridge Rossetti site assemble records that trace how the exhumation altered the poems’ textual history. Around those facts, legend embroidered hair that continued to grow and whispers that savour the Gothic; against such embroidery, Siddal’s own drawings, preserved and exhibited, return the reader to the artist’s hand.

To read the painting back into its century sharpens its pity and its argument. The Great Exhibition taught multitudes to prize magnitude and speed beneath a canopy that transfigured daylight, whereas the Brotherhood instructed their audience in a language of sincerity and severity earned by close observation. Parlour manuals on floriography reinforced codes that already saturated cemeteries and bouquets; Millais, who entered the stream with the patience of a naturalist, took that code out of parlours and into a bank where species stand in situ, so that Shakespeare’s garland acquires a literal habitat. The picture’s intimacy with water and with the tendons of plants promotes a reverence created by fieldwork and endurance under weather in place of theatrical gesture, which explains why the painting addresses industry and empire without adopting their rhetoric, since it advances a truth grounded in the small that challenges any boast grounded in the large.

Approach the surface and a particular music emerges as fibres, glazes, and highlights synchronize into a pulse. Reeds lean across eddies as a weaver sets weft against warp; the gown throws back struck glints that ring against green; flesh glows with a chill radiance that appears to travel through ground and glaze before returning to the skin’s soft architecture; step back, and the composition resolves as nested arcs that usher the eye along a shadowed corridor toward a darker depth where foliage gathers, while the river bends around the figure with the patience of a sentence that carries a terrible subordinate clause. In the balance between painter and model, the work discovers an ethic: Millais behaves as a magistrate of surfaces and species who grants each observed detail the dignity of sworn testimony, while Siddal sustains an oath written in breath and muscle that allows the image to hold its poise through cold and fatigue. Standing before Ophelia, one enters a time assembled by glass palaces, coded bouquets, steam presses, and imperial display, yet one also encounters two lives whose labour outruns the fashions that framed them.

The painter’s career closes with honours and with Westminster’s solemnities, whereas the model’s course ends with a coroner’s certificate and a legend that the public recites with the zeal reserved for tragic icons; the canvas preserves both with even justice. Violets continue to cling at the throat as a liturgy of youthful death; a single daisy meets the cheek and secures innocence within a scene that tests it; the red flower near the hem circles in green water like a wakeful eye that watches until song surrenders to current. The air above the mouth still holds a place for a final bar, and the mind, catching that silence, hears the line that supplies England’s most persuasive river of grief—There is a willow grows aslant a brook…—so that tragedy and stream proceed together, united by paint that keeps faith with nature while it tallies the price exacted by its own fidelity.

Across the picture’s span, a historical wager announces itself: if a century exalts engines, exhibitions, and empire, an image of a drowned young woman, attended by plants painted from life and by a model whose ethic equalled the painter’s, may yet articulate a counter-vision where attention confers dignity and where beauty arises from labour carried to extremity. Millais and Siddal together realize that wager. He meets nature with a jurist’s regard; she meets the task with a votary’s endurance; Shakespeare supplies a text that water repeats; and the nineteenth century, with all its glass and iron, with all its pamphlets and parade, receives a riverbank in which one figure, sustained at the edge between hymn and immersion, gathers every thread and draws them through a single aperture of breath. The image holds, the current bears her, and the viewer learns a grammar in which petals carry sentences, garments hold memory, and a mouth, opened to the sky, commits a last unhurried vow.

The museum label will list materials, dates, and provenance, as scholarship requires; yet the picture itself conducts a more searching inquiry through touch and light, through pauses and flows, through a gaze that leans toward heaven without pleading and hands that open to the world without resistance. In that inquiry one sees Millais’s family story—Channel Island roots, a mother’s London rooms where a brotherhood formed, a marriage that grew from scandal into a settled household with portraits of children whose faces still carry warmth—and one sees Siddal’s: a Holborn beginning, a milliner’s bench, a studio table scattered with drawings and drafts, a stipend that recognized talent, a marriage braided with instruction and desire, a grave opened and then closed again. Each life continues in the painting’s still river. The bank remains exact; the water maintains its pale sheen; the figure rests in a posture that accepts both the world’s weight and the spirit’s ascent; and the viewer, learning from flowers that speak and from fabric that drinks light, encounters an England that prized industry while yearning for reverence, an England here answered by a single breath held between hymn and submergence.