Ophelia, c.1851-1852, retouched 1854. Oil on canvas, lunette shaped. 27 x 48 3/4 inches (68.7 x 123.8 cm). Collection of Manchester City Art Gallery, accession no. 1955.105. Reproduced via Art UK under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (CC BY-NC-ND). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Hughes exhibited this early masterpiece at the Royal Academy in 1852, no. 1247. It was the first of his pictures exhibited at this venue that could truly be called Pre-Raphaelite. Hughes entered the Royal Academy Schools too late to overlap with the youthful members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He had become interested in Pre-Raphaelitism in 1850 while still a student in the Schools, however, after reading a copy of the PRB journal The Germ. Hughes painting was shown at the same exhibition as Millais's famous version of Ophelia. The scene depicted in Hughes's painting is Ophelia's pending suicide as taken from Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 7, as described by Hamlet's mother Queen Gertrude:
There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come,
Of crow-flowers, 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 pendant bows her coronet weeds,
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide
Hughes's picture shows Ophelia at twilight prior to her fall into the stream, seated on the horizontal trunk of a willow tree in the centre of the composition, looking distracted and gazing downwards into the brook that is covered in a scum of green algae. She is shown as a pale dejected young maiden, clad in a white dress, and with a crown of reeds and flowers on her head. In her left arm she holds additional reeds and flowers while her right hand drops white flowers into the stream below. The foreground and midground is a green marsh with the trunks of silver birch trees to the right as well as a prominent toadstool. On the left a bat glides over the stream and under the willow tree.
Richard Altick felt this painting might have been influenced Richard Redgrave's Ophelia that he had exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1842, no. 71, where Hughes possibly could have seen it (300-01). There are certainly some similarities between the two paintings with Ophelia shown in the centre of the painting, clad in white in a similar pose, and seated on a horizontal tree trunk and dropping flowers into a stream. Hughes painting was engraved in c.1861as a steel engraving in by Charles Cousen and published by Virtue & Co. in S. C. Hall's Selected Pictures from the Galleries and Private Collections of Great Britain. The engraving was reprinted in The Art Journal in 1865 facing page 332.
Ophelia. 1865. Engraving by Charles Cousen after Arthur Hughes from The Art Journal. 4½ x 6½ inches (11.4 x 16.5 cm) – image size. Private collection. Image courtesy of the author. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
When Hughes's painting was shown at the Royal Academy in 1852 it was not widely discussed by reviewers with the focus instead being much more on Millais's version of this subject. Hughes was apparently unaware of Millais's picture when he was working on his own painting. Staley has pointed out that the two pictures are vastly different in both conception and style: "The distraught maiden is not yet in the brook, but sits on its edge shredding flowers into the water. The flowers and a few of the foreground plants are precisely delineated, but the rest of the painting dissolves into un-Pre-Raphaelite vagueness and suggestion of deep space … Hughes is remarkably effective in evoking mood" (235).
Hughes later recalled the fate of his own picture of Ophelia at the 1852 Academy where it was skied, likely contributing to the fact that it was little noticed by critics. It was, however, admired by Millais who met Hughes for the first time on varnishing day:
One of the nicest things that I remember is connected with an Ophelia I painted that was exhibited in the Academy at the same time as his [Millais's] own most beautiful and wonderful picture of that subject. Mine met its fate high up in the little octagon room; but on the morning of the varnishing, as I was going through the first room, before I knew where I was, Millais met me, saying "Aren't you he they call Cherry?" (my name in the school). I said I was. Then he said he had just been up a ladder looking at my picture, and that it gave him more pleasure than any picture there, but adding very truly that I had not painted the right kind of stream… He could not have done a kinder thing, for he knew I should be disappointed at the place my picture had. [Millais 146]
Reviews of the Painting
Later periodicals, however, did mention Ophelia as an important example of Hughes's early work. In 1857 Larcom writing in The Crayon gave a favourable opinion of the painting:
Arthur Hughes is one of those artists who have adopted Pre-Raphaelitism as their rule in Art. He has painted several pictures of a very exquisite description, exhibiting most delicate and refined fancy, with an admirable feeling for expression, elegance, and color. The first picture of his which exhibited Pre-Raphaelite convictions was called Ophelia, and represented Shakespeare's heroine, seated on the bank of a sluggish stream; worn, wasted, and half lost in the sick insanity of her hapless love, she had crowned herself with half-withered garlands, and was playing with her own thought of death; the background of the picture was very fine, a waste marish spot, open to the low horizon, with some stark birches along the banks of the stream, whose pale, silvery bark and half-denuded boughs, were in excellent keeping with the character of the subject. [327]
A critic for The Art Journal in 1865, commenting on selected pictures from the collection of the late Thomas E. Plint, singled out this painting by Hughes:
Mr. Ruskin, in his "Notes on some of the Principal Pictures exhibited at the Royal Academy" in 1858, speaks inferentially of this artist as one of the "leaders" of the Pre-Raffaellite school, and reprobates the absence of the rest from the gallery. Mr. Hughes, though certainly less known than some who have attained notoriety in the style of Art which the eloquent author of "Modern Painters" takes under his especial protection, is certainly entitled to assume the rank in which he has been placed. While deprecating the injudicious encomiums which have too often been lavished by writers and amateurs on the pictures of this school, it must fairly be acknowledged that Pre-Raffaellitism has led painters to earnest, serious thought, and to diligent, painstaking execution. "In learning to work carefully from nature, everybody has been obliged to paint what will stay to be painted, and the best of nature will not wait."
That this style, in its least extravagant form, should acquire popularity, is not extraordinary: the great mass of those who visit our picture galleries can better understand what is purely naturalistic in Art than what is purely ideal, especially in landscape painting; they are charmed with a bank of moss, or a bunch of wild flowers, or the texture of a garment which rivals the actual material. "This natural Art speaks to all men; around it daily the circles of sympathy will enlarge"; but the ill-drawn, thin, attenuated figure, having no form of comeliness nor personal beauty, excites only the surprise or ridicule of the many, whatever meaning the artist intends it to convey.
The painter of Ophelia is not one who carries his predilections to the extreme; he preserves — better than most of his compeers— the juste milieu, between the two opposites of Pre-Raffaellitism natural and Pre-Raffaellitism unnatural; or, in other words, he shows us that the Art to which this title has been given may be made attractive, just as others have seemed to labour only for the purpose of showing its repulsiveness. The picture in question is an example. Here, every blade of grass, every leaf and flower, are given with the most exquisite delicacy and the most scrupulous fidelity, and yet there appears no overstrained elaboration, while the colour of all is very rich and brilliant, both in the gradations of green verdure, and in the twilight sky, now deepening in the horizon into the intensest purple. On the trunk of a tree sits the distraught maiden… A sweet, child-like face is Ophelia's, its look of vacancy scarcely dimming its beauty; the absence of reason developing itself rather in her actions, as she drops the white blossoms into the slowly-flowing stream, and watches them quietly floating away, than in her countenance. The whole figure, as it appears in the picture, suggests the idea of an exquisite cameo in a setting of rich enamels. The composition is, undoubtedly, that of an artist whose mind has thoroughly felt his subject, and given to it a truly poetical rendering. [332]
In 1884 F. G. Stephens wrote of this picture when it was in the collection of the Liverpool merchant John Bibby:
A charming picture by an unequal artist presents itself in the delicate and original Ophelia of Mr. Hughes. The irresistible pathos of the verses sung by the love-lorn lady sitting on the tree fallen across the fatal pool was never more faithfully or subtly expressed than in this, a juvenile work of the painter. The vague look of the sorrow-stained eyes, the pallid flesh, the long, golden, dishevelled hair, the outstretched hand laden with wildflowers, the dimness of the woodland vista, and the faultless taste of every touch and circumstance, are among the most precious facts of modern English art. Why are there not more of such delightful and touching pictures by the same hand? [409]
Hughes later began a version of Ophelia in c.1863-64, later reworked in 1871, of a quite different composition. It was exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in 1871 and is now in the Toledo Museum of Art. It shows Ophelia standing and picking flowers for a garland shortly prior to her committing suicide by drowning. A sketch for this version is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (accession no. WA1977.23).
Links to Related Material
- Reduced version of Ophelia in its frame, in Lord Andrew Lloyd-Webber's collection
- Representations of Ophelia
Bibliography
Altick, Richard D. Paintings from Books: Art and Literature in Britain, 1760-1900. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985.
Bennett, Mary. "A Checklist of Pre-Raphaelite Pictures Exhibited at Liverpool 1846-67,
and some of their Northern Collectors." The Burlington Magazine CV (November 1963): 488-89, 495n.
Larcom, Lucy. "The Two Pre-Raphaelitisms." The Crayon Vol. IV, Part XI (1852): 325-39.
Millais, John Guille. The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais. Vol. I. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company: 146.
Ophelia. Art UK. Web. 1 March 2025.
Roberts, Len. Arthur Hughes His Life and Works. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors' Club, 1997, cat. 10, 123-24.
"Selected Pictures. From the Collection of the Late T. E. Plint, Esq., Leeds." The Art Journal New Series IV (1 November 1865): 332.
Staley, Allen. Romantic Art in Britain. Paintings and Drawings 1760-1860. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1968, cat. 235. 331.
Stephens, Frederic George. "The Private Collections of England. No. LXXVIII – Allerton, and Croxteth Drive, Liverpool." The Athenaeum no. 2970 (27 September 1884): 408-09.
New version of this page created 1 March 2025