Ophelia drowns offstage. Shakespeare never shows her death: the queen walks in and tells it in a single speech, with a willow, a brook and a song. For more than two centuries, painters have had to invent what the play leaves out, and in 2025 one forgotten canvas drew a crowd of pop fans into a German museum.
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A Death the Play Never Shows
Ophelia comes from Hamlet, the tragedy Shakespeare wrote around 1600. She is the young woman Hamlet courts and then pushes away, and when he kills her father by mistake, she loses her mind.
Her death is only reported. In Act IV, Scene 7, Queen Gertrude tells it: a willow branch breaks, Ophelia falls into a brook and floats for a while, singing, until the water pulls her under. A painter who takes on the subject has to choose one moment and imagine the rest.
The paintings below follow that choice. Each stops at a different point in her story, from the night of the play, before her madness, to the court, the garlands, the branch and the water. They run from a canvas made for a London publisher in 1792 to a picture that music fans lined up to see in 2025.
12. Friedrich Heyser, Ophelia (about 1900)
A woman in white lies stretched out on black, still water, ringed by white water lilies. Her long hair spreads across the surface.
Friedrich Heyser painted her around 1900, and for more than a hundred years almost nobody knew his name. A German Symbolist of modest reputation, born in 1857 and trained in Dresden, Karlsruhe and Paris, he died in Dresden in 1921. His Ophelia only reached the Museum Wiesbaden in 2017, with a private collection of Art Nouveau and Symbolist works.
That obscurity ended in October 2025, when Taylor Swift released the video for "The Fate of Ophelia," the first single from her album The Life of a Showgirl. In the opening scene she floats as Ophelia, motionless, like a living picture.
The museum staff noticed that her pose followed Heyser's canvas almost exactly, far more closely than the much more famous Ophelia by Millais. Swift herself has never confirmed it.
The effect came at once. The weekend after the video came out, hundreds of extra visitors came to see the painting. Many were American families from a nearby United States Army base, and one family had driven from Hamburg, at the other end of the country.
On November 2, the museum held a tour for fans, free to anyone who came dressed as Swift or as Ophelia, and all of its roughly two hundred places were taken. The director, Andreas Henning, said he hoped to show Swift the original one day.
At a Glance
Artist: Friedrich Heyser (1857 to 1921)
Painted: About 1900 (the exact year is unknown)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: Not published
Where to see it: Museum Wiesbaden (Hessisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Natur), Wiesbaden, Germany
11. Eugène Delacroix, The Death of Ophelia (1838)
One arm still reaches up to the willow branch she was holding, while the rest of Ophelia slides into a dark stream. The picture has its roots in a Paris theater. In September 1827, an English company opened Hamlet at the Odéon, in a language most of the audience barely spoke, and the part of Ophelia went to an unknown Irish actress, Harriet Smithson.