Tea at Trianon: The Meaning of 'Ophelia'

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, August 8, 2019

The Meaning of 'Ophelia'

From Culture Trip:

In 1894, the Tate Gallery received into its collection an oil-on-canvas painted by a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), John Everett Millais. Titled Ophelia, it depicted the aftermath of the Shakespearean heroine’s suicide in Hamlet. A morbid scene but a popular one at the time, under Millais’ brush this painting contained no violence – only an ethereally harrowing tone.

Although Ophelia was an early Pre-Raphaelite work – a work opposing the lauded Renaissance artist Raphael and his influential elegance – it exemplifies much of what the PRB initially stood for: high detail, close attention to nature, abundant colour, and non-simplistic composition, with subjects frequently stemming from the Romantic, the medieval, and the literary. Shakespeare was highly popular in the Victorian age, and the dramatic death of Ophelia, who purposefully let herself drown following her father’s murder at the hands of her lover Hamlet, frequently appeared as the subject of many pieces of art at this time. The PRB did not shy from scenes which were emotionally or morally challenging, with death frequently entering their subject choices. In the Tate collection alone, Ophelia is joined in Pre-Raphaelite scenes of death by Henry Wallis’ The Death of Chatterton, and, sailing to her death, John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott. (Read more.)