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Tay-Tay's Ophelia is positively drowning in highbrow artistic references

The Observer

|

October 19, 2025

It’s well known that pop cyclone Taylor Swift can boost a region’s economy just by performing in it.

- Barbara Ellen

Now her new video, The Fate of Ophelia - which starts with Swift fragrantly reclining in a pond — is increasing attendance in museums.

Swifties are flocking to the Museum Wiesbaden, in the German state of Hesse, to see the Friedrich Heyser painting Ophelia. The museum is delighted and offering Swifties a free tour.

Is Heyser’s depiction of Shakespeare’s doomed heroine the source of Swift’s inspiration? Some wonder if it’s John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (hanging in Tate Britain).

To me, Swift's floaty dress is more John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott, albeit via Net-a-Porter.

Though, in the video, Swift’s Ophelia gloriously survives to burn through multiple tributes: Moulin Rouge, the Supremes, Esther Williams’s water ballets... and on and on.

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