Taylor Swift fans flock to German museum to see Ophelia painting

Taylor Swift fans are boosting the popularity of a German museum displaying a portrait of Ophelia, the Shakespearean character recently recreated in a song and music video from Swift’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl.

The Hessische Landesmuseum in the central German city of Wiesbaden saw hundreds more visitors than usual over the weekend as fans hoped to see the real version of the painting featured in the opening of the music video for The Fate of Ophelia.

In the video, which has been viewed more than 65 million times on YouTube, the painting comes to life with Swift at its center.

“We’re really enjoying the attention, it’s a lot of fun,” museum spokeswoman Susanne Hirschmann told the Associated Press.

One family traveled from the northern city of Hamburg, a five-hour drive away, while some of the visitors were Americans from a nearby army base, Hirschmann said.

Hirschmann said fans realized the Friedrich Heyser painting, believed to date from 1900, was there when the team noticed the similarity and posted an announcement on their website inviting all Swift fans to join a special tour.

The news later went viral online, the museum said.

Social media posts explaining the painting’s whereabouts received thousands of likes; This is much higher than the hundreds of likes most posts receive.

In Hamlet, his wife Ophelia, a young Danish noblewoman, goes mad and drowns.

Less well-known than John Everett Millais’s painting Ophelia, this portrait also depicts a drowned woman in a long dress, surrounded by flowers.

The image is evoked by Swift’s album cover, which shows her partially submerged in water.

“We were surprised and delighted that Taylor Swift used this painting in the museum as inspiration for her video,” museum director Andreas Henning told German news agency DPA.

“This is of course a great opportunity to attract people to the museum who don’t know us yet.”

The Life of a Showgirl had the UK’s biggest opening week of 2025, selling 304,000 copies in the first seven days.

In the US, it achieved more than 4 million equivalent album units in its opening week, according to Billboard, breaking the record set by Adele with her 25 albums in 2015.

The record becomes Swift’s third album to top the UK albums chart in 2025, following Lover (Live From Paris) in February and The Tortured Poets Department, which returned to number one in April.

This is also Swift’s first studio album since announcing her engagement to NFL star Travis Kelce in August and announcing she had regained control of her back catalog in May.