Mariana in the South

Waterhouse painted this in 1897, decades after the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had broken up, keeping alive their habit of turning English poetry into pictures. His source is a Tennyson poem of 1830, itself drawn from Shakespeare, about a woman called Mariana who was promised in marriage and then cast off when her dowry was lost. She waits, year after year, in a lonely house in the south. Waterhouse shows her risen from her embroidery, her long body twisting in a blue gown as she pauses beside a pool of water. He follows one line of the poem almost exactly, the moment her face glowed clear and perfect in the liquid mirror below her.