Ophelia's Travels

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

Friends and Foes:
John McEwan, date unknown

"Ophelia was painted when he was 22.a painting on a minituristic detail on a non-minituristic scale, it is a tour de force of detailed depiction which at the historical point when photography was just emerging as a visual threat, out-records the recording power of the photograph. Art-historically. It marks a last stand in the war of the painter as sole guardian of visual truth. A photographer could get a woman to lie fully clothed in a stream but not a robin to perch above her head. The painter, Millais's picture argues, has an imaginative and emotional advantage over the photographer. Ophelia, is passionate without the melancholy yearning of a young man waiting for love to happen; and imbued with a the delight in nature instilled by his fisherman grandfather, Ophelia's stream, apart from anything else, is a fry fly-fisherman's dream."

'After the waiting, love happens at last', John McEwan, date and source unknown.

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