Ophelia
by
John Everett Millais 1829-1896
Ophelia by Millais is the most popular postcard sold by
the Tate and yet the subject is not a happy one. Ophelia is a character in Hamlet, by William Shakespeare. She is driven mad when her father, Polonius, is murdered by her lover, Hamlet. She dies while still very young in grief and madness. The events shown in Millais's Ophelia are not actually seen on stage. Instead they are referred to in a conversation between Queen Gertrude and Ophelia's brother Laertes. Gertrude describes how Ophelia fell into the river whilst picking flowers and slowly drowned, singing all the while.
Laertes Drowned! O, where?
Queen Gertude There is a willow grows askant the brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead-men's-fingers call them.
There on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up;
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death
Laertes Alas, then she is drowned?
Queen Gertrude Drowned, drowned
Most of the flowers in Ophelia are included either because they are mentioned in the play, or for their symbolic value. Millais observed these flowers growing wild by the river in Ewell. Because he painted the river scene over a period of five months, flowers appear next to those that bloom at different times of the year.
Crow flowers in the foreground look similar to buttercups and symbolise ingratitude or childishness
The weeping willow tree leaning over Ophelia is a symbol of forsaken love
The nettles that are growing around the willow's branches represent pain.
The daisies floating near her right hand represent innocence. Ophelia also mentions 'There's a daisy' in act 4, scene 5.
The purple loosestrife on the upper right hand corner of the painting, near the edge of the frame, alludes to 'long purples' in the play. Shakespeare actually meant the purple orchid.
The pink roses that float by her cheek and her dress and the white field roses growing on the river bank, may refer to Act IV, Scene V when Laertes calls his sister, 'rose of May'. They are also included for their many symbolic meanings such as youth, love and beauty.
The crownet weeds mentioned in the text refer to garlands of weeds. They may
symbolise entanglement, choking, death and decline.
The garland of violets around Ophelia's neck refer to Act IV, Scene V. 'I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died: they say he made a good end.' Violets are a symbol of faithfulness and they can also symbolise chastity and death in the young.
Some people believe there is a skull hidden within the painting. Before the location is revealed, have a look and see if you can see it (once it is pointed out, it is hard not to see it). Look to the left of the forget-me-nots on the right of the painting, a nose and two hollow eyes can just be made out. This may well be just the light and shade in the foliage or the skull may be a reminder of death and hint at what is about to happen.
Millais's model was a young woman aged 19 years called Elizabeth Siddall. She was discovered by his friend, Walter Deverell, working with a needle in a milliner's, and would later become the wife of one of Millais's friends, Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1860. This was the only time Elizabeth posed for Millais. She was described as "tall and slender, with red, coppery hair and bright consumptive complexion."
She was Rossetti's muse, inspiring his artistic production. He painted her as an enigmatic woman who never looks straight at the spectator unlike the directness of her own self-portrait. They married in 1860, but; "The marriage turned into a catastrophe. Siddall's melancholia and illness prevailed.She was anxious, restless, in part because of Rossetti's infidelities, heavily addicted to laudanum, to release her from the pain of both disease and distress." (Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic by Elisabeth Bronfen, 1992, p.176)
In 1862 she died from an overdose of laudanum; "perhaps accidental or perhaps a suicide; in either case the overdose may have been related to post-natal depression after the birth of her stillborn child the previous year." (The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites by Elizabeth Prettejohn, Tate, London, 2000, page 74).
Suggested Reading:
Over her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic by Elisabeth Bronfen 1992
The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites by Elizabeth Prettejohn, Tate, London, 2000
Sources:
Tate Britain
Ophelia
Rossetti
*******
Have a wonderful day everyone! Take care.
Labels: Art, Arts and Madness, Hamelt
N Posted by Rain at 8/29/2007 11:09:00 AM
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Arts and Madness~Poets
The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator
by
Anne Sexton The end of the affair is always death.
She’s my workshop.
Slippery eye, out of the tribe of myself my breath
finds you gone.
I horrify those who stand by. I am fed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Finger to finger, now she’s mine.
She’s not too far. She’s my encounter.
I beat her like a bell.
I recline in the bower where you used to mount her.
You borrowed me on the flowered spread.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Take for instance this night, my love,
that every single couple puts together
with a joint overturning, beneath, above,
the abundant two on sponge and feather,
kneeling and pushing, head to head.
At night alone, I marry the bed.
I break out of my body this way, an annoying miracle.
Could I put the dream market on display?
I am spread out. I crucify.
My little plum is what you said.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Then my black-eyed rival came.
The lady of water, rising on the beach,
a piano at her fingertips, shame
on her lips and a flute’s speech.
And I was the knock-kneed broom instead.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
She took you the way a woman takes
a bargain dress off the rack
and I broke the way a stone breaks.
I give back your books and fishing tack.
Today’s paper says that you are wed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
The boys and girls are one tonight.
They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies.
They take off shoes. They turn off the light.
The glimmering creatures are full of lies.
They are eating each other. They are overfed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Anne Sexton, “The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator” from The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981).
Anne Sexton married at the age of 19, worked briefly as a model and then started a family. Sexton suffered from depression and had mental breakdowns and suicidal bouts after the births of her children and the deaths of her parents. In the late 1950s she began writing poetry as therapy and was soon "discovered" by the literary world for her unapologetically autobiographical poems. The recipient of many awards and grants, she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for Live or Die. In 1974 she committed suicide.
I hope you enjoyed this poem as much as I do. Take care everyone!
Labels: Arts and Madness, Poetry, Women in History
N Posted by Rain at 3/24/2007 08:53:00 AM
Friday, October 06, 2006
Arts and Madness~Schizophrenia
The British artist Louis Wain was a highly successful illustrator whose reputation was made on his singular and gently humorous pictures of cats. A cat-lover himself and sometime President of The National Cat Club, Wain claimed in an interview in 1896 that his "fanciful cat creations" were first suggested to him by Peter, his black & white cat.
Demand for Wain's work diminished in the decade after the outbreak of the First World War, leaving him progressively impoverished. He began to show signs of mental disorder (
schizophrenia), including becoming aggressive, abusive and sometimes violent. In 1924 he was certified insane and placed in the paupers' ward of Springfield Hospital at Tooting. Despite his delusional state, Wain continued to draw and paint, which led a year later to him being recognized by one of the hospital guardians and transferred to a private room at the Royal Bethlem Hospital in Southwark, with money raised through public appeal.
schiz·o·phre·ni·a (skts-frn-, -frn-) n.
Any of a group of psychotic disorders usually characterized by withdrawal from reality, illogical patterns of thinking, delusions, and hallucinations, and accompanied in varying degrees by other emotional, behavioral, or intellectual disturbances. Schizophrenia is associated with dopamine imbalances in the brain and defects of the frontal lobe and is caused by genetic, other biological, and psychosocial factors.
A situation or condition that results from the coexistence of disparate or antagonistic qualities, identities, or activities: the national schizophrenia that results from carrying out an unpopular war.
In Bethlem he was allowed to draw as much as he liked, and it was here that he produced the first of his fascinating series of "kaleidoscope" cats. These ranged from relatively straightforward renderings of the cat itself, though painted in intense, non-naturalistic color and surrounded by intricate geometric patterns which deny any illusion of spatial depth, to images in which the figure of the cat is exploded in a burst of geometric fragments, the like of which are not to be found in any of Wain's work before his illness. In 1930 he was moved to Napsbury in Hertfordshire, where he continued to work sporadically until his death in 1939.
Want to learn more? Here are some sources:
Have a good day everyone!
Labels: Arts and Madness, Mental Illness Awareness Week
N Posted by Rain at 10/06/2006 08:13:00 AM
,
Michael,
