« Je suis à moitié lasse des ombres », dit la Dame de Shalott

This was the third time John William Waterhouse painted the Lady of Shalott, and the last. He had shown her before at the moment of doom, drifting toward Camelot to die. Here, late in his life, he went back to the beginning of Tennyson's poem, when she is still shut in her tower, cursed to weave what she sees only as a reflection. She sits at her loom in a red dress, and the world reaches her secondhand, in the mirror behind her: a bridge, the towers of Camelot, two figures who may be the young lovers the poem names. The line he took for his title is her first stir of restlessness, half sick of shadows, before she ever looks out the window. He finished it in 1915 and died two years later.