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Location: Oldham Art Gallery
The Work of:
Dante Gabriel Rosetti
English Pre-Raphaelite Artist
1828 - 1882
The character of Shakespeare's tragic Ophelia, driven mad by Hamlet's rejection of her love and his killing of her father, had special resonance for Rossetti. In the early 1850s Rossetti made a number of sketches of Elizabeth Siddal as Ophelia, and in ca 1856 she herself wrote a poem - A Year and A Day - in which she identified herself with the drowning Ophelia, whose destiny is ..a sadder dream.
After Lizzie's death, Rossetti produced a number of watercolors based on those initial sketches. The First Madness of Ophelia portrays an incident that does not occur in the play. Rossetti imagines Ophelia being led away from Claudius and Gertrude by Horatio after bursting in on the court in the first showing of her madness.
Quoted From: The First Madness of Ophelia by Dante Gabriel Rossetti - ArtMagick
I don't know why the Archangel of Earth came through as a guy in archetypal ecopunk gear, but he did. As I discuss in my blog, andrewbwatt.wordpress.com, I think that drawing angels and archangels, and the Mansions of the Moon, and the Decans of the Zodiac, was a kind of drawing curriculum for the classical and maybe Medieval world, as well as the Renaissance.