Ophelia's Travels

Ownership History  |  Sir Henry Tate Gift  |  Exhibition History  |  Friends and Foes

Friends and Foes:
London Times, 1852

".there must be something strangely perverse in the imagination which sources Ophelia in a weedy ditch, and robs the drowning struggle of that love-lorn maiden of all pathos and beauty, while it studies every petal of the darnel and anemone floating on the eddy, and pricks out a robin on the pollard from which Ophelia fell."

London Times, first notice at the Royal Academy 1852 exhibition, quoted in PRB Millais PRA (exhibition catalogue), by Mary Bennett, Liverpool and London, Walker Art Gallery and The Royal Academy, 1967, p.33.

".the unfortunate productions of Mr Millais and his friends, and we now regret to find the same absence of any sense of beauty and the same mixture of the pathetic and the grotesque."

The Times, 1852, Millais, A Biography, G. H. Fleming, 1998, London, p.86.

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