The Most Beautiful Drowning Ever Painted

Shakespeare does not let us watch Ophelia die. Her drowning arrives secondhand, in a messenger's speech. John Everett Millais decided that was not enough, and painted the exact moment the play looks away.

He painted it in the wrong order, and obsessively. First the river, a stretch of the Hogsmill in Surrey, sitting outdoors for months through 1851 and 1852, rendering every leaf and reed and blossom with almost frightening patience. Only later did he add the figure.

For that he asked Elizabeth Siddal to lie in a bathtub of water in his studio, lamps underneath to keep it warm. One day the lamps went out. She lay there anyway, freezing, until the sitting ended, and caught a cold so severe that her father sent Millais the doctor's bill. She is the pre-Raphaelite face of a girl going under.

Look at the flowers, because Millais meant every one. The willow above her is forsaken love, the nettles are pain, the daisies innocence, the poppy near her hand is death. He turned a botanical field guide into a language of grief, and let nature bloom, indifferent and gorgeous, around a dying girl.

He painted the one thing the play would not say out loud.

It is now among the best-loved paintings in Britain, endlessly reshot and reimagined. And the reason is the discomfort at its heart: it is a picture of a death that is far too beautiful, which is exactly what makes you unable to look away. Art doing the job that even Shakespeare handed to a messenger.