A New Exhibition Shows Women as Artists, Not Muses
The meaning of art is in the eye of the beholder. To straitlaced Victorians, John Everett Millais’s painting Ophelia epitomized the shocking new ideals of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of rebel artists who rejected the prevailing style of the period. To feminist art historians, however, Ophelia represents something else: the brutal limitations placed upon women by the artistic establishment.
Surrounded by flowers, Shakespeare’s tragic heroine—exploited and rejected by Hamlet—floats lifelessly in the water in Millais’s rendering, an image of silent, still, passive beauty. The story of the painting’s creation is notorious: The model was Elizabeth Siddal, who later married another Pre-Raphaelite painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. For four months, she spent several hours every day in a tepid bathtub, heated by, the water went cold, and she caught a severe chill. Not just a passive beauty, but also a suffering one.
