The Lady of Shalott by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The Pre-Raphaelitesand The Lady of ShalottNote: For best results, play this presentation in conjunction with Loreena McKennitts The Lady of Shalott as audio accompaniment.The Pre-Raphaelites were a radical group of Victorian painters founded in 1848.They challenged artistic conventions of form and composition.Their paintings were highly symbolic and lush in detail, beauty, and color.

Flaming June, by Frederic Leighton

Ophelia, by John Everett Millais

Some subjects were religious; others secular. The Pre-Raphaelites subjects were wide-ranging.

Dante Gabriel RossettiBeata BeatrixThe Scapegoat

William Holman Hunt, 1854The medieval period was quite popularStitching the Standard

Edmund Blair-Leightonas was Alfred, Lord Tennysons Arthurian poem The Lady of Shalott. The Pre-Raphaelites identified with the Lady as an artist:

She works her vision of the world into her art.Trapped in a tower, the Lady is cursed to see the world only through an enchanted mirror.The Lady of Shalott

By William Holman HuntAnd thus, as an artist, though she sees the worldShe is forever separate from it.The Lady of Shalott

John Sidney Meteyard, 1913Though it reveals the world to herthe mirror is a screen between herself and reality.

I Am Half-Sick of ShadowsJohn William WaterhouseOne day, driven to look directly through her window, she sees a sight that changes her forever:Lancelot, the bravest of Arthurs knights and the castle of Camelot behind him. The Lady of Shalott Sees Lancelot

John William Waterhouse, 1894The Accolade

Edmund Blair-LeightonThe sight of Camelot brings the full force of the Ladys curse upon her. The Lady is doomed from that moment.The encounter with the real world

unmediated by her art or the mirrorwill end her life.Desperate and dying, she writes her name on the prow of a boatHer mirror cracks from side to sideand she feels the curse come upon her.The Lady of Shalott

By John William Waterhouseand floats to Camelot, the place that has always been forbidden to her.John Atkinson Grimshaw

The Lady of Shalott, 1878To those at Camelot, the Lady of Shalott is largely an unreadable text.They have no idea who she is.By the time she arrives there, she is dead. The Lady of Shalott

Arthur Hughes, 1873Lancelot, unaware he is a central cause of her death, can only reflect that she has a lovely faceand pray that God in his mercy sends her grace. The Lady of Shalott

John Atkinson Grimshaw