The model is traditionally said to be the artist’s wife. The setting is not identified, although the Waterhouses frequently visited Somerset and Devon. The landscape setting is highly naturalistic the painting was made during Waterhouse’s brief period of plein-air painting. Waterhouse’s biographer Anthony Hobson relates that the artist owned a copy of Tennyson’s collected works, and covered every blank page with pencil sketches for paintings. Tennyson was a popular subject for artists of this period, particularly the Pre-Raphaelites. Waterhouse shows her letting go the boat’s chain, while staring at a crucifix placed in front of three guttering candles.

The punishment that follows results in her drifting in her boat downstream to Camelot ‘singing her last song’, but dying before she reaches there. The mirror cracks from side to side, and she feels the curse come upon her. One day she glimpses the reflected image of the handsome knight Lancelot, and cannot resist looking at him directly. Not daring to look upon reality, she is allowed to see the outside world only through its reflection in a mirror. She lives isolated in a tower on an island called Shalott, on a river which flows down from King Arthur’s castle at Camelot.

Tennyson’s poem, first published in 1832, tells of a woman who suffers under an undisclosed curse. And at the closing of the day She loosed the chain, and down she lay The broad stream bore her far away, The Lady of Shalott. The picture illustrates the following lines from part IV of Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’:Īnd down the river’s dim expanse Like some bold seer in a trance, Seeing all his own mischance – With glassy countenance Did she look to Camelot.

The lady of shalott by alfred tennyson