Tate Britain staff rehang John Everett Millais's Ophelia among its pre-Raphaelite brethren. Photograph: Copyright Sarah Lee for the Guardian  One of the Tate's best-loved paintings, Ophelia by x, has returned to its gallery after a world tour with other gems from the pre-Raphaelite collection.  The paintings, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti's glowing Beata Beatrix, Ford Madox Brown's Jesus Washing Peter's Feet, and William Holman Hunt's The Awakening Conscience have been on tour in the US, Russia, Japan – where a poster of Ophelia was once banned in case it encouraged young girls to emulate her suicide – and Italy, where they were seen by more than 1.1 million people.  The exhibition, stage at Tate Britain in 2012, celebrated the works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, members of which saw themselves as returning to the colour and truth of medieval art. Although they were often sneered at by the critics in their day and by those since, their paintings have always been among the most popular works in the gallery.  Ophelia was part of the founding collection of the gallery, presented by the sugar millionaire Sir Henry Tate in 1894, and has always been among its top 10 best-selling postcards.  Penelope Curtis, director of Tate Britain, said: "It has been fascinating to see how popular the pre-Raphaelites have been in different international contexts and how they resonate with other cultures. It is great to welcome them back and to be able to integrate them into our permanent displays again."  The Millais painting shows Ophelia drowning, as described in Shakespeare's Hamlet: "Her clothes spread wide/ And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up/ Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes/ As one incapable of her own distress."  Millais painted the landscape of riverside plants and flowers in obsessive detail on the banks of the Hogsmill river in Surrey. He worked for up to 11 hours a day, six days a week and was threatened by the local farmer with prosecution for trampling across his field and destroying the hay. "My martyrdom is more trying than any I have hitherto experienced," he grumbled. "The flies of Surrey are more muscular, and have a still greater propensity for probing human flesh."  Even Millais recognised that he couldn't keep his model, Rosetti's lover Lizzie Siddall, lying in a cold river for more than 60 hours a week. Instead he persuaded her to lie, fully clothed in an old gown which he bought for £4, in a bath at his studio. He kept the water warm by lighting little oil lamps underneath it, but in one particularly gruelling session the lamps burned out, Siddall ended up lying in freezing water, and caught an appalling cold. Her father threatened to sue Millais for her medical bills – which allegedly came to £56,a sizeable sum in the mid-19th century.  Although it has often been claimed that the chill was fatal, Siddall lived for another 10 years, and died from an overdose of laudanum.  The critic John Ruskin liked the painting but not the fact that Millais had used a home counties brook, describing it as "that rascally wirefenced garden-rolled-nursery-maid's paradise". Three years later Ruskin's wife Effie Gray left him for Millais after the artist painted her portrait. The Ruskins' unconsummated marriage was annulled and Gray married Millais. The couple had eight children.
Ophelia by John Everett Millais and other popular works from permanent collection back on Tate walls after two years away