John Everett Millais’s painting Ophelia inspired the cover of Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl.
The standard album cover references Millais’s early-1850s painting, which depicts Shakespeare’s Ophelia floating in a stream shortly before her death in Hamlet. Swift’s cover echoes the submerged-water imagery while transforming it into a glamorous, rhinestone-heavy showgirl portrait.
The connection also relates to the album’s opening song, “The Fate of Ophelia.” That track reimagines the literary figure’s fate in a modern romantic context, while the cover uses the painting as a visual reference rather than reproducing it.
A common mix-up is naming Hamlet as the painting. Hamlet is the Shakespeare play in which Ophelia appears; Ophelia is the title of Millais’s painting. Millais was a British painter and a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.