About this work
The painting captures the moment immediately after the Lady of Shalott has looked directly out of her window at Sir Launcelot, as her fate begins to unwind.
She stands within her circular loom, ensnared by the threads of a breaking tapestry — an unfinished weaving intended to represent Galahad presenting the Holy Grail to Arthur.
The Lady is dressed in a feather-textured bodice over a cream chemise and pink ruched skirt, her long thick auburn hair blown high above her head by the turmoil consuming the room.
Doves scatter past a great silver candlestick, while the large round mirror on the wall behind her — cracked from side to side — reflects Launcelot riding past and the pillars of the tower window. The canvas is dense with competing incident, yet Hunt's jewel-bright palette holds it together: every surface — the silks, the metalwork, the decorative roundels — blazes with the almost hallucinatory clarity he achieved by painting in thin glazes over a wet white ground. The silver lamp on the right, decorated with owls and sphinxes, is extinguished, suggesting wisdom overwhelmed by temptation.
Hercules — given a halo to signify him as a type of Christ — and the Virgin Mary in prayer flank the central mirror, setting duty and sacrifice against the Lady's fatal act of longing.
In the 1880s, Hunt turned to the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, a favourite Victorian literary source.
The painting has its roots in Hunt's c. 1857 drawing, engraved on wood by John Thompson and printed in the lavishly illustrated Moxon edition of Tennyson's *Poems* — but the monumental oil, worked on across nearly two decades, is an altogether more freighted undertaking. A thirty-year period elapsed between his first two depictions of the subject and his later painted interpretations, in which he sought to convey what he called "the severer philosophic purport of the symbolism throughout the verse."
Although based on Tennyson's poem, Hunt produced his richly symbolic painting as an illustration of human failure to carry out accepted duties with responsibility.
The Lady of Shalott is herself an artist, and the painting may reflect Hunt's own aesthetic on the consequences of turning away from duty and yielding to the temptations of the world.
It stands as a powerful example of later Pre-Raphaelitism — a culminating statement by the one member of the Brotherhood who never wavered from its founding ideals.
This is a painting that demands a room with breathing space and strong, directional
