Ophélie

By 1883 Alexandre Cabanel was the grand old man of the French Salon, the painter its juries trusted and the young Impressionists resented. Here he turned to Shakespeare, catching Ophelia as she slips from a bent willow toward the stream, still half-reclining, more graceful than doomed. An Englishman, John Everett Millais, had painted the most famous Ophelia thirty years earlier, counting every reed and leaf along a real Surrey river. Cabanel does the reverse: smooth skin, an idealized calm, flowers loosely brushed. The broken willow branch beneath her comes straight from Queen Gertrude's speech describing the drowning, the one detail he keeps strictly faithful to the play.