La Dame de Shalott regardant Lancelot

Victorian Britain was in love with Tennyson, and no poem of his gripped painters like The Lady of Shalott, about a woman under a curse who may look at the world only through a mirror as she weaves. Waterhouse painted scenes from it three times across almost thirty years. This is the middle one, from 1894, and it catches the fatal second: high in her tower she has glimpsed the knight Lancelot riding past, reflected in her glass, and she twists away from the loom toward the window to see him directly. In the poem that turn breaks the spell and dooms her. The golden thread she has been weaving still loops around her knees as she rises. Waterhouse gave the picture to the city of Leeds the year after he finished it.