A Dama de Shalott

Tennyson published The Lady of Shalott in 1832, and by the 1880s his medieval poems were part of how Victorian England pictured its own past. Waterhouse painted this in 1888, choosing the poem's last turn. A woman has lived shut in a tower on an island above Camelot, forbidden to look at the world directly, allowed only to watch it in a mirror as she weaves. One glimpse of the knight Lancelot breaks her, she looks, and the curse takes hold. Waterhouse shows her here, having left the tower, seated in a small boat among the reeds, the tapestry she wove trailing over the side into the water. Three candles stand at the prow, two already blown out. She has loosed the chain and is about to drift down the river toward Camelot, singing, and she will be dead before she arrives.