Ophelia's Travels

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Friends and Foes:
Punch, 1852

".I have this year experienced a new sensation at the Exhibition of the Royal Academy. And I hasten to record my sense of the obligation to Mr. Millais. I offer my hand to that Pre-Raphaelite brother. I bow down to him, and kiss the edge of his palette. I have rapped him over the knuckles, in former years, with my pen. He is at liberty to return the compliment, this year, with his maul-stick.

Before two pictures of Mr. Millais I have spent the happiest hour that I have ever spent in the Royal Academy Exhibition. In those two pictures (Ophelia and A Huguenot) I find more loving observation of Nature, more masterly in the reproduction of her forms and colours, more insight into the sentiment of our greatest poet, a deeper feeling of human emotion, a happier choice of a point of interest, and a more truthful rendering of its appropriate expression, than in all the rest of those eight hundred of canvas put together.

He has painted Ophelia, singing, as she floats to her death, with wide open unconscious eyes, gazing up to heaven. The woven flowers have escaped from her relaxing fingers, and are borne idly with the long mosses of the stream, past the lush July vegetation of the river bank. The red-breast pipes on the willow spray, the wild roses give their sweetness to the summer air, the long purples peer from the crowding leaves, the forget-me-nots lift their blue eyes from the margin as she floats by, her brown hair drinking in the weight of water and slowly dragging down the innocent face with its insane eyes, till the water shall choke those sweet lips, now parted for her own death-dirge.

Talk as you like, M'Gilp, eminent painter, to your friend Mr. Squench, eminent critic, about the needless elaboration of those water mosses, and the over making-out of the rose-leaves, and the abominable finish of those river-side weeds matted with gossamer, which the field botanist may identify leaf by leaf. I tell you, I am aware of none of these. I see only that face of poor drowning Ophelia. My eye goes to that, and rests on that, and sees nothing else, till-buffoon as I am, mocker, joker, scurril-knave, street jester by trade and nature-the tears blind me, and I am fain to turn from the face of the mad girl to the natural loveliness that makes her dying beautiful.

detail of Ophelia © Tate, London 2003

''Our Critic' Among the Pictures,' Punch, 2 May 1852, pp.216-217.

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