I have to declare two pieces of personal interest in this painting:

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1. When I was 16 this was my favourite painting in the Tate (now Tate Britain). It appealed, no doubt, to my adolescent sense of tragedy.

2. The river which Millais used as the setting is the Hogsmill River, part of my last parish's boundary. From time to time we were visited by (often Japanese) TV companies making yet another film of 'the actual spot' where Millais set his painting.

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The inspiration for this painting comes from Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act IV, Scene vii. Ophelia, driven mad by Hamlet's behaviour (and by the fact that he murdered her father) drowns in the stream. Did she jump? Did she fall? 

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For Millais, the story gave him plenty of opportunities to paint in detail. (You can read elsewhere of the opportunities it offered for mishaps with bath-tubs and the hapless Elizabeth Siddal). The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, of which he was a member, revelled in painting nature hyper-realistically. Each leaf and blade and petal in this painting could come from a botany textbook.

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But be clear: Millais hasn't painted a scene from a play - an illustration of a moment in the play's narrative. Millais has brought to the canvas the text of the play.

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I heard a well-known TV botanist (on one of the afore-mentioned Japanese TV programmes) announce that Millais had "got it wrong". The various flowers which Millais has included don't come into flower at the same time. But Mr Botanist, artists aren't illustrators. What Millais has done here is to include all the flowers which Shakespeare referenced as being associated with Ophelia. He has paid Shakespeare the courtesy of re-presenting his text; not an imagined fixed moment in time.

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This is also part of the magic of art: it is capable of collapsing time, space and the laws of physics in ways which, say, a camera could never even approach.