Ophelia (2021) Original Oil Painting by Nicolas Maureau

A white lily floating on black water, a woman who has already stopped fighting the current: this is Ophelia, the fourth painting in the Melancholy series, taking up Ophelia's fate in Shakespeare's Hamlet, a scene the Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelites returned to again and again, the moment she loses her mind after Hamlet pretends he never loved her.

The lily is not incidental. It quotes Rimbaud's poem Ophélie directly, written when the poet was barely sixteen:

Sur l'onde calme et noire où dorment les étoiles
La blanche Ophélia flotte comme un grand lys,
Flotte très lentement, couchée en ses longs voiles...
– On entend dans les bois lointains des hallalis.

Rimbaud's Ophelia is already legend before she drowns, beautiful and undone in the same breath, and that doubling runs through this painting too. Nothing violent happens here, no struggle, no cry. Just a body given over to water that has already closed over her, calm on the surface, and somewhere far off, the sound of a hunt that has nothing to do with her anymore.

Materials used:

oil painting

Details:

• Oil painting on Canvas
• One of a kind artwork
• Size: 130 x 97 x 2cm (unframed) / 130 x 97cm (actual image size)
• Ready to hang
• Signed on the back
• Style: Photorealistic
• Subject: People and portraits

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