Ophelia

This is Shakespeare's Ophelia from Hamlet, in the last minutes before she drowns. Waterhouse painted her more than once, and in this 1894 version he holds back from the death itself. She sits on a fallen willow trunk that leans out over a lily pond, in a white gown worked with gold, wildflowers already twined into her loose auburn hair. The most famous Ophelia of the age, by the painter John Everett Millais, had shown her floating drowned and still singing. Waterhouse keeps her on the bank a moment longer, gathering flowers with her mind already gone, the water lilies waiting on the surface below her.