Ophelia, 1852, retouched c.1857-58. Oil on panel. 20 x 36 inches (51 x 91.5 cm). Collection of Lord Lloyd-Webber. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
This is a reduced version of the painting, likely initially an oil sketch, that is similar in both date and design to the one that Hughes had shown at the Royal Academy in 1852. Hughes likely worked on the two versions concurrently (Christian 85). The smaller version may have started as an elaborate study for the larger work but was completed as an independent version with minor variations in detail. Its principal scholarly importance is the fact that this is the version that Hughes exhibited at the famous first Pre-Raphaelite group semi-private exhibition, held at 4 Russell Place, Fitzroy Square, in 1857, no. 34. When it was exhibited there a reviewer for The Critic equated it with the version earlier shown at the Royal Academy: "Arthur Hughes' Ophelia painted in 1852, was condemned to the Octagon-room. It is a work of lurid imagination, realising the horrors of the swamp and of death by drowning in such a pool with horrible fidelity. On this ground we have our objection to the picture; we had rather imagine Ophelia's death not accompanied by extraneous horrors" (280).
This was also the version of Ophelia that Hughes lent to the Exhibition of Modern British Art in America held later that same year. It was shown in New York at the National Academy of Design in October-December 1857, no. 85. When the painting was exhibited it did not receive a favourable reception, however, from the critic of The Crayon, a publication generally favourable to the Pre-Raphaelites, who dismissed it as "a powerful representation of a maniac, but not of our Ophelia" (343). After the New York show Hughes withdrew the painting and had it sent back to London rather than sending it on to Philadelphia and Boston. It next appeared in 1858 at the dealer Ernest Gambart's French Gallery Winter Exhibition held at 120 Pall Mall, cat. no. 68. Here it also failed to impress a critic of The Art Journal who recognized it as being in the Pre-Raphaelite manner which he disliked:
In Ophelia we find the essence of the new-school principle; everything – the herbs, the flowers, the water itself (for she is at the brink of the brook) – seem to have been created for the nonce; and Ophelia – poor Ophelia – is a pale wax figure, modelled with particular attention to the nursing of such repugnant features as present themselves in the full bloom of Pre-Raffaelite art; and yet there are passages of the work unsurpassable in their mimicry of nature, and in these the principle is the beautiful, – and wherefore should not also the beautiful prevail in the humanity of the picture? The head of the figure is large and vulgar in character, and the gaunt arm and coarse hand in no way justify the infatuation of Hamlet. [355]
The painting was later exhibited at the International Exhibition held at South Kensington in 1862.
Roberts and Evans found the setting of the picture as appropriate to the story Hughes wished to tell:
A wraith-like girl draped in what might be her winding sheet, becomes one with the floral setting of the picture, as she surveys the flowers she has scattered in the foreground pool. The willow on which the diminished figure sits slithers out of the picture to the left, like a giant antediluvian serpent. Only a few slim trees grow in the swampy ground extending behind her into what Allen Staley has called an "un-Pre-Raphaelite vagueness." One toadstool to the right and a bilious green growth of moss on the water surface, as well as the low-flying bat which Rossetti found suitably repulsive, all suggest the damp gloom of impending death. An evening remnant of the day illuminates her lonely figure as she cradles a sheaf of broken bullrushes loosely in her arm; her "cornet weeds," spiking out of her otherwise unadorned hair, recall iconographically the crown of thorns. Dramatically poised at the edge of her fate and framed within a gilt lunette, a pensive Ophelia commands the centre stage for one final moment, functioning almost like the queen she might have become. [28]
Links to Other Versions and Related Material
- Full-sized version in Manchester City Art Gallery
- Millais's kind remarks to Hughes about his Ophelia
- Representations of Ophelia
Bibliography
Christian, John. Fine Victorian Pictures, Drawings and Watercolours. London: Christie's (4 November 1994): lot 98, 84-85.
"Pre-Raffaelite Pictures." The Critic XVI (15 June 1857): 280.
Roberts, Len. Arthur Hughes His Life and Works. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors' Club, 1997, cat. 10.3, 124-25.
Roberts, Len and Mary Virginia Evans. "Sweets to the Sweet": Arthur Hughes Versions of Ophelia." The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic Studies Vol. I, No. 2 (Fall 1988): 27-40.
"Sketchings. American Exhibition of British Art." The Crayon IV (November 1857): 343-44.
"The Winter Exhibition, at 120, Pall Mall." The Art Journal New Series IV (1 December 1858): 354-55.
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