This is one of the most famous paintings in the world, and almost no one knows the haunting story of the woman lying in the water... This is Ophelia, by John Everett Millais, finished in 1852. The scene is from Hamlet, the young woman who loses her mind after the man she loves kills her father, and drowns in a stream while singing and gathering flowers. Millais caught the instant before she goes under, hands open, lips still parted in song, her gown pulling her down. In the play, her death is almost a throwaway. It happens offstage, and the queen simply reports it afterward: "There is a willow grows aslant a brook... When down her weedy trophies and herself fell in the weeping brook." A few more lines, and the story moves on. Millais took that half-second and spent the better part of a year on it. Every flower in the water is real, painted with the obsessive botanical precision the Pre-Raphaelites were famous for, and almost every one carries a hidden meaning. The pansies floating on her dress stood for love in vain. The violets around her neck meant faithfulness. The daisy near her hand, innocence. The weeping willow leaning over her was the old symbol of forsaken love. And bright against her gown, one red poppy: the flower of sleep and death, which Shakespeare never mentioned, and which Millais added himself. He built the whole tragedy into the foliage, in a language his Victorian viewers could read like text, and which we drift right past today. To get the water right, Millais did something extraordinary: he painted the river first, outdoors, on the banks of a stream in Surrey, sitting there for five months, recording every leaf and reed. Then, through the following winter, he painted the girl. Her name was Elizabeth Siddal. She was twenty-two, discovered working in a hat shop, and she would become the great tragic figure of this whole story. To pose as the drowning Ophelia, Siddal lay for hours in a bathtub of water in Millais’s studio, wearing an antique silver gown he had bought for the purpose. It was winter, so he set oil lamps beneath the tub to keep the water warm. One day, absorbed in his work, Millais did not notice that the lamps had gone out. Siddal, the perfect model, said nothing and did not move, and lay there in the freezing water until the session ended. She caught a severe cold that turned to pneumonia. She recovered, but never fully, and she never posed for Millais again. And here is the detail that turns this painting into something almost unbearable to look at: ten years later Elizabeth Siddal died of an overdose of laudanum, the opium drug that Victorians took by the spoonful. She was thirty-two. Look again at that single red poppy Millais slipped into the picture, the flower that has always meant both sleep and death, and that opium is made from. He painted a beautiful young woman playing a girl who drowns. He could not have known he was also depicting her fate. Some paintings do not stay inside their frames...