The Pre-Raphaelites often painted scenes from books, especially concentrating on the Bible and Shakespeare.
Ophelia, a famous painting by John Everett Millais, shows the death of Ophelia from Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet. Mad with grief after her father was killed, she was supposed to have fallen into a stream while picking flowers and drowned.
Millais spent four months working by a river, plagued by mosquitoes and unfriendly landowners, in an attempt to make his setting lifelike. For Ophelia, he asked his model, Lizzie Siddal, to pose in a bathtub so he could study the effect of water.
Lizzie ended up marrying Millais’ friend, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a painter who was in the young group of British painters who admired the spirituality of Medieval art. When Lizzie died, Rossetti threw a book of his poems into her grave; however, he later dug them up again so that he could publish them.
Note: In the painting, Ophelia is surrounded by beautiful plants, all painted from life, and having symbolic meaning. The weeping willow represents sadness, daisies invoke innocence, and poppies and violets are associated with death.