A woman sits alone in a boat, letting go of the chain that held it. She is dressed in white, the boat is draped in her own weaving, and three candles burn at the prow — two of them already out. She is looking downriver toward a city she will not reach alive.
That is John William Waterhouse's The Lady of Shalott, painted in 1888, and it remains one of the most reproduced British paintings of the nineteenth century.
The Poem It Comes From
The painting illustrates a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, first published in 1832 and substantially revised in 1842. (A common confusion: Sir Henry Tate did not write it — he bought the painting.)
Tennyson took the story from Elaine of Astolat in Arthurian legend. A woman lives under a curse in a tower on the island of Shalott, forbidden to look directly at the world. She watches it in a mirror and weaves what she sees into a tapestry. When Sir Lancelot rides past and she turns to look at him directly, the mirror cracks and the weaving flies loose. She goes down to the river, writes her name on a boat, casts off, and dies before she reaches Camelot.
Waterhouse chose the moment of casting off — not the death, but the decision.
And down the river's dim expanse
Like some bold seer in a trance,
Seeing all his own mischance—
With a glassy countenance
Did she look to Camelot.
Who Waterhouse Was
John William Waterhouse was born in Rome in 1849 to English painters, and was called Nino as a child — a nickname that stuck for life. The family returned to England in the 1850s, he worked in his father's studio, and he entered the Royal Academy schools in 1870.
He is usually filed with the Pre-Raphaelites, though the Brotherhood had dispersed while he was still a boy. What he took from them was the manner: literary and mythological subjects, dense natural detail, and a recurring interest in women from myth who are dangerous, doomed, or both — Circe, Cleopatra, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Lamia.
He married the artist Esther Kenworthy. They had no children. He died in 1917.
Where to See It
The Lady of Shalott was shown at the Royal Academy in 1888 and bought by Sir Henry Tate, who presented it to the public in 1894. It hangs at Tate Britain in London — not, as is often written, at the National Gallery.
What Is In the Picture
Almost every object is carrying meaning, which is part of why the painting rewards a long look.
- The three candles. Two are already out. Life measured and running down.
- The chain. She is in the act of releasing it. Every version of this story turns on a choice to leave.
- The tapestry over the boat. Her own weaving — her art — now serving as a shroud, with scenes from the poem worked into it.
- The crucifix and rosary beside her, and a lantern.
- A single fallen leaf in her lap. Autumn, and a fallen woman, in one small detail.
- The color. Her white dress against a background of dark greens and browns. She is the only bright thing in the picture, which is what makes the composition work at a distance.
What the Poem Is About
Isolation is the obvious reading, and Tennyson keeps two words ringing through the poem — Camelot and Shalott — to hold the two worlds apart. Camelot is movement, people, traffic on the river. Shalott is a silent island with one woman in a tower whose name we are never given beyond her title.
The mirror and the loom carry a second reading, about art itself. She can only make her weaving from reflections; direct experience destroys both the mirror and the work. Whether Tennyson meant that as a warning to artists or a complaint about it is exactly what people have argued over for two centuries.
A third reading is about Victorian women, and it hardly needs drawing out: Lancelot rides where he likes, and she may not look out of a window.
The Other Versions
Waterhouse returned to the subject twice more, and the three together make a sequence:
- 1888 — the boat, after the curse has taken hold.
- 1894 — The Lady of Shalott Looking at Lancelot, the moment of turning.
- 1915 — I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, before any of it, at the loom.
He painted them in reverse order of the story, which is either a coincidence or the most interesting thing about them.
Other Victorian painters took up the poem too, among them Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Atkinson Grimshaw and William Holman Hunt.
A Note on the Comparison Below
This is Millais's Ophelia, not the Lady of Shalott — the two are constantly mistaken for each other, and it is worth knowing which is which. Ophelia is Shakespeare, drowned among flowers; the Lady of Shalott is Tennyson, still upright in a boat. Both are Pre-Raphaelite, both are young women dying on water, and both hang at Tate Britain.
If You Want to Paint It
We do not sell a Lady of Shalott kit — our catalog is licensed American landscape, wildlife and floral artwork, and it is here.
Waterhouse died in 1917, so his work is out of copyright, and Custom Paint by Numbers will convert an image you supply into a numbered canvas. Be warned that it is a demanding subject: the tapestry and the foliage carry an enormous amount of small detail, so choose a large canvas and a generous color count.
If you would rather build up to it, painting still life in acrylics covers the light and composition side, and passive and active colors explains why that white dress reads the way it does against those dark greens.
