"I am half sick of shadows," said the Lady of Shalott

John William Waterhouse

Oil on canvas

Art Gallery of Ontario

This luminous oil painting depicts the Lady of Shalott — the cursed protagonist of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's celebrated 1832 poem — resting wearily at her loom in her tower, clad in a rich red gown and gazing into a large mirror that reflects the vibrant outside world, including distant Camelot and a pair of young lovers she can never truly reach. Painted with the rich, glowing color and idealized feminine beauty characteristic of the Pre-Raphaelite tradition, the composition brims with symbolic detail: the loom's shuttles deliberately echo the shape of boats, foreshadowing the Lady's tragic fate, while the checkered floor and Romanesque arches lend the scene an almost Vermeer-like intimacy. John William Waterhouse (1849–1917), born in Rome to two English painters and trained at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, devoted his career to immortalizing mythological and literary heroines with a passion for Tennyson so deep that he reportedly filled every blank page of his copy of the poet's collected works with pencil sketches. Hanging today in the Art Gallery of Ontario, this is the third and final time Waterhouse returned to the Lady of Shalott — a haunting, emotionally resonant capstone to a lifelong obsession that makes it an extraordinary conversation piece for any home.