On his famous canvas, Milles captured the moment when Ophelia, half submerged in water, sings.
From the tragedy of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, we know that the girl went crazy about the fact that the prince Hamlet, whom she loved, killed her father, Polonius. Madness led Ophelia to death. Milles began to paint this picture at 22, like many young people of his age, he literally raved about Shakespeare’s immortal play. And on the canvas I tried to convey as accurately as possible all the nuances described by the playwright.
For the scene of the death of Ophelia, Milles chose a picturesque river corner. The figure of the girl Milles wrote after he had finished the river landscape – in the workshop during the winter months. The model, Elizabeth Siddel, posed for the artist, lying in a bath with warm water. Unfortunately, the pose turned to Elizabeth for the deterioration of her health: once the lamps with which they warmed the water in the bathtub had failed, and the girl’s constipation, which had tormented her, worsened.
Pre-Raphaelites basically used a white base. Starting the creative process, they covered small areas of the canvas with white paint and wrote on it until it dried out. True, Milles used this technique only on those fragments of the canvas, where he painted the landscape. The Milles technique is still not fully understood, but it is known that at first he applied the exact picture of the future picture to the canvas, and then he took up paint.
The artist did not paint over the white base those areas where the most picturesque flowers appeared later. The most difficult thing for Milles to create this painting was to depict a female figure half submerged in water. Writing it from life was quite dangerous, but the technical skill of the artist allowed him to perform a clever trick: to write water in the open air, and the figure – in his workshop.
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