Ophelia
John Everett Millais (1851–1852)
John Everett Millais’s Ophelia shows Shakespeare’s heroine floating in a narrow stream, her jeweled dress both buoying and engulfing her. Millais renders the riverbank with <strong>forensic botanical precision</strong>, so that reeds, willow, briars, nettles, and a scatter of emblematic flowers surround a face slack in mid‑song and hands raised in <strong>open‑palmed surrender</strong> <sup>[1]</sup><sup>[3]</sup>.
