As a professor of pre-Raphaelite studies, I was excited to see that the track list for Taylor Swift’s 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl includes a song called The Fate of Ophelia. Ahead of the album’s release, fans and art historians speculated that the inspiration could come from John Everett Millais’s painting Ophelia (1851-52), one of the most visited paintings at Tate Britain.
The painting shows Ophelia, the heroine of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet (1623), floating in the river after her doomed relationship had driven her to madness and suicide.
The cover art for The Life of a Showgirl confirms this. It shows Swift wearing a silvery outfit, partially submerged in water with her hands floating palm-up to the surface. So far, so Everett Millais. Though the styling is very different from Millais’s work, the pose, with focus on her hands and face, seemed to give a nod to his Ophelia.
