Hamlet und Ophelia

In September 1827 an English company took a Paris theatre and played Hamlet in English. Few in the audience followed every word, and it hardly mattered. The composer Berlioz went and fell in love with the actress playing Ophelia. Delacroix, then 29, came away with a subject he worked at for the rest of his life. From 1834 he made a set of Hamlet lithographs that the critics ignored and almost nobody bought. This painting of 1840 belongs to the same long return to the play, and it is tiny, about 29 centimetres tall, a picture meant to be looked at close up rather than across a room. He was still painting Hamlet subjects in the 1850s, more than 20 years after those evenings at the Odeon.