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A 200-year-old museum in Germany has found itself in the eye of a storm of delighted Taylor Swift fans when it emerged that one of the probable inspirations for the music video of her new song The Fate of Ophelia was hanging on its wall.
In the opening scene of the clip for the first song on Swift’s blockbuster new album The Life of a Showgirl, one of the world’s biggest pop stars assumes the role of the tragic Shakespearean character. The video, released earlier this month, was watched more than 27m times on YouTube in the first three days.
Since then, fans have been flocking to Museum Wiesbaden in the western German city to see a painting by Friedrich Heyser from about 1900 that appears to have served as the model for Swift’s own take.
“We are having an absolute Ophelia run at the moment and are quite surprised and happy about it,” a museum spokesperson, Susanne Hirschmann, said on Thursday.
“It’s been a shock, to be honest. We have a colleague who has a friend who is a Swift fan and she noticed the video’s opening scene had a similarity [with the Heyser painting] and we thought, wow, what a coincidence – that’s exciting.”
Although the museum has been unsuccessful so far in its attempts to reach Swift’s team, it did not take long for fans to make the connection themselves, as word spread on social media.
Hirschmann estimated that 500 people visited last weekend specifically to see Heyser’s Ophelia painting, having asked museum personnel where they could find it – far eclipsing the usual amount of interest in the wispily romantic image showing Ophelia’s rosebud lips slightly parted and her lifeless body surrounded by water lilies.
The visitors, many of them young women and girls, have been posing for photos before the painting. “It’s a lot more teens than we usually see,” Hirschmann said.
She said the museum, which is celebrating its 200th anniversary this year, was caught completely off guard by its brush with Swift-mania.
Hirschmann said: “We have a wonderful art nouveau collection. Many of our guests want to see Alphonse Mucha; they want to see Hector Guimard. But this is the first time we’ve really had a run on a painting.”
“I always liked it,” she said of the Heyser portrait, adding: “Thanks to Taylor Swift, it’s entered a whole new dimension.”
At first, the museum’s management was worried that a rush of Swifties could be disruptive to the other guests, but Hirschmann said the fans had “a respectful approach”. “It’s really lovely for us that suddenly everybody is talking about art too, thanks to a global star like Taylor Swift,” she said. “It’s crazy.”
It is not the first time the singer has borrowed from Shakespeare for material, with the 2008 hit Love Story taking a page from Romeo and Juliet.
It is unclear why Swift appears to have drawn inspiration from Heyser’s vision of Hamlet’s Ophelia, who drowns in a river after her lover accidentally kills her father. In Swift’s song, the “eldest daughter of a nobleman” who “lived in fantasy” meets a happier ending.
Initially, Swift watchers thought she had found her muse for the opening scene of the video in the better-known work by John Everett Millais from 1852 at London’s Tate museum, but the colour of the dress and the angle of her pose pointed them to Heyser.
Now, staff in Wiesbaden are speculating whether the American superstar had been in their midst to see the painting for herself without their knowledge, perhaps during her three-city sweep through Germany in July 2024 during the Eras tour.
“That would be truly insane!” Hirschmann said. “We did ask ourselves: how did this come about? Did she pick the painting out? Has she seen it for herself? Was it a member of her team? I think if Taylor Swift came here, even incognito, we would have noticed.”
Seizing on the unexpected opportunity, the museum has organised an Ophelia reception on 2 November, including a guided tour explaining the history of the painting, Shakespeare’s character and her depiction in Swift’s tune.
