Alice Pike Barney, born Cincinnati, OH - Ophelia - ca. 1909 - T-Shirt

A woman lies back in dark water, eyes closed, her pale face and golden hair drifting on the surface beside white water lilies.

Visual Elements & Composition

The pastel is built as a horizontal band. The figure sits low on the sheet, her head and shoulders resting in the water, while the rest of the picture is given over to the pool. Her face is softly modelled in peach and grey, and a fall of golden hair spreads beneath her across the surface. On the left, two pale lilies touched with blue and yellow rise from the water. The water itself is made of broken strokes of dark blue, teal and green, with lighter ripples across the lower third. The palette is quiet and cool, with the warm tones of the face and hair held against the dark surface.

Meaning & Symbolism

The title refers to Ophelia, the character in Shakespeare's Hamlet who drowns in a stream surrounded by flowers. Nineteenth-century painters returned to this scene again and again, and the young woman lying in water among blossoms came to stand for beauty, grief and the fragility of life. The closed eyes, the calm face and the lilies carry that tradition forward, and the dark water gives the image its silence and stillness. The picture was made by Alice Pike Barney (American, 1857–1931), a painter and pastellist who worked in Washington, D.C., and Paris. Her literary and allegorical pastels belong to the Symbolist and Aesthetic movements of the turn of the century, where myth and literature supplied the themes for atmospheric images like this one.

Carrying the Scene Onto Cotton

A tee is worn close to the body and seen from every side, so the image moves as the wearer does. The horizontal composition of the pastel sits naturally across the chest, with the figure resting low and the dark water filling the space around her. The lilies and the rippling blues carry the mood of the original sheet into a garment you can wear every day.