La Mort d'Ophélie

In September 1827 an English company brought Hamlet to Paris and played it in English. It caused a sensation. Berlioz sat through it and fell in love with the actress playing Ophelia. Delacroix was 29 and had been reading Shakespeare since a stay in London two years earlier, and he came back to this one scene, the queen's account of the drowning, for the rest of his life, in a set of lithographs and in several paintings. This is the last of them, made in 1853, small enough to hold in two hands, and it reached the Louvre in 1902 with the bequest of the collector Thomy Thiéry. He catches her at the moment the branch gives way, one arm still hooked over it, the picked flowers already loose in the water.