“The painting illustrates a particular moment in the play, in which Ophelia finds her way to the brook, where she meets her end amongst the flowers that she has gathered. This moment, though frequently figured as a descent into madness, can also be interpreted as an escape from the patriarchal dominance that has moulded her…
Tag: Shakespeare
The Real Ophelia
The scene depicted is from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act IV, Scene vii, in which Ophelia, driven out of her mind when her father is murdered by her lover Hamlet, falls into a stream and drowns: There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weedsClambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;When down her weedy trophies and herselfFell in…
Thomas Francis Dicksee: Jessica (1867)
Farewell, and if my fortune be not crossed, I have a father, you a daughter, lost. — Jessica, The Merchant of Venice Who Is Jessica? This painting shows Jessica, a character in Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice, the daughter of a Jewish moneylender Shylock, who defies her father’s wishes and falls in love with…
John Everett Millais: ‘Mariana’ (1851)
Who is John Everett Millais? John Millais (1829–1896) was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of English artists who united in 1848 hoping to renew British painting. They idealized the sincerity of purpose and clarity of form of the early Italian Renaissance artists—before Raphael—finding art that they sought to emulate. The Pre-Raphaelite…
Edmund Dulac: Abysm of Time from ‘The Tempest’
EDMUND DULAC, Abysm of time, Illustration of The Tempest Prospero. ‘What sees thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time?’ Via olosta
At Sunnyside - Where Truth and Beauty Meet 