Ernest Hébert. Ophelia, c. 1910.


Hébert's portrait of Ophelia is charged with a latent sexuality. The dark, hollow eyes stare defiantly at the viewer and suggest a pain and betrayal beyond her ability to cope. Dijkstra quotes the French magazine Je Sais Tout which reproduced this picture with "an especially telling caption": this Ophelia is "truly that helplessly abandoned ideal creature, whose hallucinating eyes see nothing more than what is within, and who, hair loosened and streaming down, will in a few moments enter gently into the stream which will carry her--a cut flower among other cut flowers--away to that world beyond whereof her madness is already an expression" (43). This stark portrayal of madness and sensuality is among the most striking of the various pictures of Ophelia.