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Ophelia Weaving Her Garlands
Richard Redgrave·1842
Historical Context
Redgrave's Ophelia Weaving Her Garlands from 1842 depicts Shakespeare's doomed Hamlet character at the moment before her drowning — gathering the garlands that would become her funeral decoration. Ophelia was one of the most popular subjects in Victorian painting, combining feminine beauty, mental fragility, and tragic death into an image that embodied Victorian culture's ambivalent fascination with the vulnerable woman destroyed by male indifference. Redgrave's version predates the Pre-Raphaelite interest in Ophelia by a decade; his treatment is more conventional than Millais's famous 1851 painting, but it participates in the same cultural preoccupation with female suffering and natural setting as vehicles for exploring feminine tragedy.
Technical Analysis
The oil on canvas combines a naturalistic landscape setting with Pre-Raphaelite attention to botanical detail, using soft light and flowing composition to convey Ophelia's distracted, dreamlike state.
See It In Person
Victoria and Albert Museum
London, United Kingdom
Gallery: Paintings, Room 82, The Edwin and Susan Davies Galleries
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