Her lips are parted, her hands grasp the air and her eyes are half-open, as if in sublime submission. The tragic heroine Ophelia – as represented in John Everett Millais’s 1852 painting – lies in a near orgasmic state at the moment of her death.
But if reproductions of the image are now so ubiquitous as to be un-noteworthy – adorning gift cards, purses and tote bags – it is worth remembering that at the time of its creation Ophelia was considered by many to be scandalous.
Not only is her hair loose and her body unrestricted by a corset (both states of undress in Victorian England seen only in the bedroom), nature swarms around her in obscene abundance. Indeed, one critic at The Times of London chastised Millais’s “perverse” imagination in placing such a maiden in a “weedy ditch”.
Now, for the first time ever, Millais’s Ophelia, alongside John William Waterhouse’s 1888 masterpiece The Lady of Shalott, are being exhibited together outside of the UK. They are the blockbuster draw in Love & Desire: Pre-Raphaelite Masterpieces from the Tate, which opened at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) last week.
Love & Desire touches on everything from nature to religion. But the nuanced – sometimes troubling, always fascinating – depictions of women are what stand out. The Pre-Raphaelites showed women as sexual creatures, capable of sensuality, lust and carnal passion, even if such behaviour is, in many stories they tell, punished.
“They’ve very powerful women,” says NGA director Nick Mitzevich. “They are central characters, seductresses, and they hold our gaze in this exhibition.”
Formed in 1848, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a band of young rebellious artists, set out with the specific mandate to shake up the stuffy Victorian establishment. Their name was derived from a rejection of the art of the time, which lionised Raphael and often presented fanciful and idealised figures in quaint settings.
In contrast, the Pre-Raphaelites put women front and centre in their work. Their figures were more realistic, drawn from real-life models and muses (sisters, lovers and friends). By placing these women in medieval or literary settings, the artists could explore the social anxieties of their day: adultery, motherhood, love, sex, death.
In Pre-Raphaelite art, women, above all, are given agency and psychological weight.
Take Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Annunciation, in which a young woman with flaming red hair and a halo recoils away from the viewer. The angel Gabriel has just delivered the news that Mary will carry the son of God, but rather than receive this bombshell with serenity, as in most religious paintings, this slip of a girl looks scared.
“She really does look like a slightly terrified young woman responding to this enormous news that is being conveyed. There is a psychological realism there,” says Judith Nesbitt, director of national and international partnerships at the Tate.
That mattered in Victorian Britain, where women were viewed as scarcely more responsible than children (they were forbidden, for example, from owning a bank account or voting). Success meant marriage, offspring and the smooth running of domestic affairs.
Yet paintings such as Millais’s The Order of Release 1746, which depicts the release of a Jacobite rebel from jail, show a different story. While all the men look downwards, avoiding eye contact, the wife – who has just secured her husband’s freedom – looks straight ahead: capable, strong and stoic.
“It’s not what you expect from a Victorian painting,” says Carol Jacobi, curator of British art 1850-1915 at Tate Britain, on a tour of the collection. “It gives her power.”
Inspiration came from complex lived experiences: these were men (and some women: female artists displayed in Love & Desire include the poet and model Elizabeth Siddal) who lived as they painted, embracing a bohemian, often wilder, lifestyle. They were unafraid to love freely and were uninhibited by the usual social mores.
Reflecting this, the woman in The Order of Release 1746 is Effie Ruskin: the love of Millais’s life who was trapped in a frigid, passionless marriage with the critic John Ruskin. In a daring move, she sued him for an annulment, citing non-consummation of their vows (Ruskin had refused to touch her) and married Millais in 1855.
The ideal of the “Angel in the House” – as the popular Victorian saying went – was also shattered.
In Millais’s The Vale of Rest, a nun digs a grave, her muscular forearms popping with veins and sinews. In Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience, the blame for lapsed morals and prostitution – usually laid at the fallen woman’s feet – is more fairly shared with the man, who is shown in sin. And in Ford Madox Brown’s unfinished portrait Take Your Son, Sir, a mother holds out her infant child like a Renaissance Madonna. This mother is not tranquil, however, but troubled, offering her baby aloft with pain and horror. Motherhood – particularly in an era when childbirth was often fatal and infant mortality high – was shown in all its brutality.
For all this, the Pre-Raphaelite women are not always paragons of feminist virtue. Many are depicted as damsels in distress or femme fatales, such as Arthur Hughes’ La Belle Dame Sans Merci, taken from the John Keats ballad, in which a forest sorceress lures men to their deaths with her charms.
And while the Pre-Raphaelites challenged the gender norms for their day, new stereotypes arose out of the ashes of the old.
Rossetti painted women who had “very strong jaws, very strong hair, very self-sufficient. They just dominated the pictures,” says Jacobi. His tastes were not shared by all: many critics at the time declared the women ugly. But Rossetti and the women he painted – Elizabeth Siddal, Jane Morris, Fanny Cornforth – helped recast a notion of beauty that still resonates today: bee-stung lips, thick, waxy hair and dewy skin. Florence Welch, with her wavy long red locks, has deliberately honed the Pre-Raphaelite look. On a less positive note, the mania for “trout pouts” via lip fillers is also, in many ways, a cosmetic continuation of a trend first made fashionable in the 1850s.
As Jacobi puts it: “Rosetti had many followers, so that very voluptuous, dreamy, self-sufficient Pre-Raphaelite look did become a kind of shorthand. It became its own new norm of beauty. Once you get any norm of beauty that becomes restrictive.”
What’s more, while the Pre-Raphaelites were more liberal in lifestyle, the tales they chose to depict often showed the consequences of passion run amok. Ophelia, spurned by her lover (who, it is hinted in Hamlet, she has slept with) drowns herself. The Lady of Shalott searches for the man she loves, Sir Lancelot, knowing it will kill her.
In Picnic at Hanging Rock, director Peter Weir drew on the Pre-Raphaelites as inspiration for the schoolgirls who disappear on a Valentine’s Day picnic in 1900. Miranda, with her honey-coloured hair and loose white clothes, is a typical Pre-Raphaelite beauty. In the buttoned-up mores of the time, which dictated that girls should be meek and modest, she shimmers with mystic independence and sensuality. (Notably, when Irma, another missing girl, is miraculously found, her corset has been removed).
Picnic at Hanging Rock was created in 1975, well over a century after Millais. It is a reminder, though, that old habits die hard. When the girls, on the cusp of womanhood, vanish into the ravenous bush – much like when Ophelia sinks into her watery grave – there is one message: that desire, lust and the awakening of sexuality has dire consequences.
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