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It is Ophelia’s death that inspired one of the most famous artistic portrayals of the character, by John Everett Millais. Ophelia’s pose, open-armed as she seemingly drifts towards her death in the 1852 painting, symbolises the dichotomy of this literary character: it is associated both with martyrs and the erotic. Elizabeth Siddall, a muse of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the wife of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was the model. She famously caught a chill posing as Millais was so…
