The death of Ophelia
Eugène Delacroix·1838
Historical Context
The Death of Ophelia from 1838 at the Bavarian State Painting Collections shows Delacroix's deep engagement with Shakespeare, whose works provided subjects throughout his career and whom he considered the greatest dramatic genius of all time. Ophelia's madness and drowning — her garlands of flowers, her singing, her final submersion while the brook bore her up — embodied the Romantic fascination with beauty, insanity, and death in a subject of extraordinary poetic richness. Delacroix's reading of Shakespeare was the most profound of any French artist, and his Ophelia treatments returned repeatedly to the theme of a woman destroyed by the incapacity of the men around her to recognize her reality. As the leading French Romantic painter, his journal records his constant study of color relationships and his admiration for Rubens, Constable, and Veronese alongside Shakespeare. The Bavarian State Painting Collections in Munich hold this as an important example of Delacroix's Shakespearean subjects in German public collections.
Technical Analysis
The figure of Ophelia is rendered amid water and flowers with rich color and dramatic handling. Delacroix's palette creates an atmosphere of tragic beauty appropriate to Shakespeare's heroine.
Look Closer
- ◆Delacroix's Ophelia floats not yet fully submerged, flowers still in her hair and hands — the text's specific detail of her garland-wreathed drowning preserved.
- ◆The water around Ophelia is painted with broken, agitated brushwork — even the gentle stream given Delacroix's characteristic sense of continuous movement.
- ◆The willow tree hangs its branches in the water — the specific Shakespearean detail of the 'envious sliver' that broke and cast her to the brook.
- ◆The flowers she carries are distinguishable species — rosemary, pansies, fennel, columbines — painted with enough botanical specificity to identify.
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