Ophelia does not drown on stage. In Hamlet the death happens out of sight and Gertrude reports it in a speech — the willow, the brook, the garlands, the clothes that spread wide and held her up for a while before they pulled her under. Millais painted the thing nobody in the play sees.
Five months on the Hogsmill
He painted the landscape first and he painted it outdoors, on the Hogsmill river at Ewell in Surrey, over five months in 1851 — a whole summer and into the autumn, sitting at the water's edge, for a strip of riverbank a few feet across.
The plants are named species done from life, and they were chosen to be read: daisies by her right hand for innocence, nettles for pain. Nothing in that water is decoration. It is a list of meanings, botanically accurate, assembled by a man sitting in a field in Surrey with a canvas.
Then he went back to his studio in Gower Street in London and painted the figure indoors, through the winter. The river and the woman were never in the same place at the same time. He also bought a secondhand antique dress for four pounds to put her in, because the Pre-Raphaelite rule was to paint the thing itself rather than a memory of it.
The bath, and the bill
Elizabeth Siddal was twenty-two. She lay in a bath full of water in the studio, fully dressed, session after session, with oil lamps underneath to keep the water warm.
On one occasion the lamps went out. Millais was so far inside the work that he did not notice, and she said nothing and stayed where she was until the sitting was over. She got very cold and became seriously ill, and her father made Millais pay the doctor's bills.
Siddal was a painter and a poet in her own right, with work of her own that almost nobody can name. She is remembered instead as a body in water in somebody else's picture, holding a pose in cold water because the man at the easel had asked her to. She died ten years later, at thirty-two.
Accurate in everything but the death
Add up what the picture cost to get right: five months for the river, four pounds for the dress, a winter and an illness for the woman. Every plant is a real plant and the water is real water, studied inch by inch.
The only thing in it that was not painted from life is the drowning, which Shakespeare kept offstage and Millais kept weightless — she is still floating, her hands are still open, and the garments heavy with their drink have not yet done their work.
It went to the Royal Academy in 1852 and the critics disliked it, largely for the weeds — one reviewer complained about an imagination that would souse Ophelia in a weedy ditch. It is now one of the best-known pictures at Tate Britain, and the stretch of the Hogsmill it was painted on is an ordinary suburban river with a footpath along it.
A river in Surrey, a woman in a bath in London. They only ever meet in the picture.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.