ophelia by alexander cabanel; ophelia by friedrich wilhelm theodor heyser; ophelia by jean baptiste bertrand; detail from ophelia by john everett millais
What they didn’t tell you in Hamlet was that Ophelia died because she was basically hooking up with half of Denmark, and then everyone forgot about her.
John Everett Millais, The Blind Girl, 1854, oil on canvas. Millais was one of the founders of the pre-raphaelite movement, which sought to imbue British art with the same detail and vitality seen in Italian renaissance painting. Although this piece does possess a sentimental theme it is still alluding to a deeper meaning. The blind girl and the child mirror the image of the virgin and christ, and the butterfly which sits on her shawl is symbolic of the soul, the fact the butterfly and the double rainbow go unnoticed is also indicative of the girls blindness to the beauty around her, due to her affliction. Despite this through the religious imagery we can assume that Christ will endow her with a new and better vision as in the biblical miracle.
“They took out their precious book.” Wood engraving by Joseph Swain, based on the artwork of John Everett Millais, for the periodical Once A Week, volume 6, December 1861 - June 1862.
Since exhumations are all the rage right now, I thought I’d share my favorite: Elizabeth Siddal, artist and model to the Pre-Raphaelites.
Siddal died of a laudanum overdose at the age of 32 in 1862 in London. Her husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, left a journal containing the only copies of many of his poems in her coffin, tucking it away in her famous red hair.
Rossetti, drug- and alcohol-addled by the end of the 1860s, became obsessed with retrieving those poems so that he could publish them. Or, it seems, Rossetti’s agent, the slightly (or totally) shady Charles Augustus Howell, became obsessed with this. In any case, Howell exhumed her coffin in the middle of the night at Highgate Cemetery.
Howell reported back to Rossetti that she was remarkably well preserved and still beautiful. Whether this was actually true or not, the manuscript didn’t make it out so well preserved. A worm had burrowed through the entire book, leaving behind a big old wormhole.
![John Everett Millais, The Rescue (1855) [©, appropriately, the National Gallery of Victoria]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/11a5fd15bd14ba0fcdf3c0dc8dc7d950/tumblr_omoilxzsCP1sjg84qo1_1280.jpg "John Everett Millais, The Rescue (1855) [©, appropriately, the National Gallery of Victoria]")
