Ophelia's Travels

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

Friends and Foes:
Jan Marsh, 1998

"Today, his drowning Ophelia (1852) is the most popular work in the Tate Gallery. Earlier this year a visitor from Australia, arriving at Millbank, burst into tears to find Ophelia away on tour in Japan. Its fame derives, of course, from the story of its model, the Pre-Raphaelite mascot Elizabeth Siddal, who lay wearing an antique brocade gown in a tin bath-tub to simulate Ophelia's last moments. The bath water grew colder and colder and - so the tale goes - Lizzie contracted pneumonia, aptly foreshadowing her own untimely death as well as that of Shakespeare's heroine".

Plenty to leave out', by Jan Marsh, Literary Review, June 1998.
(Jan Marsh, critic and author of Pre-Raphaelite Women, London, 1987).

(To learn more about Lizzie Siddall, see The Model.)

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