Oil on canvas, 100 × 50 cm (bespoke stretched linen)
£20,000

Composed in Rublev, Michael Harding, and Williamsburg oils, with a Venetian glass and litharge medium and finished in damar varnish, Ophelia represents a synthesis of technical refinement and poetic depth.

The process itself mirrors the painting’s subject: the slow movement from light to suspension, from animation to repose.

The composition presents the figure in near-vertical format, her body reclining within a field of dense green water and foliage.

The red of her hair becomes the chromatic axis of the painting, a counterpoint to the deep vegetal harmonies that surround it.

The tonal structure is meticulously modulated: a choreography of translucency and opacity that renders the skin luminous against the cool, submerged ground.

Formally, the work stands within the lineage of the Pre-Raphaelites yet departs from Millais’ narrative literalism. Ophelia’s stillness in this painting is not theatrical but phenomenological, an image of consciousness dissolving into nature.

The painting invites contemplation rather than pity, transforming tragedy into a meditation on equilibrium and transience.

The textual root remains Shakespeare’s Hamlet, yet the sensibility is closer to the symbolist poetics of D. G. Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne.

From Swinburne’s poem Laus Veneris comes a line that echoes the painting’s inward quiet:

“All the world’s night, and the sleep whereon it grows,
Hangs round me as a weight of wind and snows.”

Through its measured structure and control of tone, Ophelia becomes not an image of death but of surrender, a reconciliation between matter and stillness.

The precision of its materials and the serenity of its form restore to the subject the dignity of reflection that Shakespeare only implied.

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