On either side the river lie, Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro' the field the road runs by, To many-tower'd Camelot…
Alfred Tennyson's poem 'The Lady of Shalott' is first published in 1832.
It's revised in 1842 which is the year when van Eyck's 'Arnolfini Portrait'
was acquired by the National Gallery.
… There she weaves by night and day, A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say, A curse is on her if she stay,
To look down to Camelot.
'The Lady of Shalott' takes place in a tower
where the lady, a mysterious weaver, lives all by herself.
She is living under a curse, which means she's not able to look out her window.
She must only look at reflections in a mirror.
In looking at these reflections, she's inspired
to weave a tapestry of what she sees.
The Pre-Raphaelites were fascinated by the poem, The Lady of Shalott
for its magical realism,
the fact the lady is a craftsperson working in the spirit of the Middle Ages,
and also for its powerful psychology.
One day she sees the knight Sir Lancelot
riding past in her mirror,
and she's so moved by passion for him that she actually turns
and looks out the window,
at which point her mirror cracks and the curse falls upon her.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack'd from side to side;
"The curse is come upon me," cried
The Lady of Shalott.
The Pre-Raphaelites loved this poem at first sight.
They loved its colour, its feeling, its atmosphere, its mood,
and its beautiful use of language,
and they set about immediately trying to translate that into a picture.
Holman Hunt is the first to do so in 1850.
He draws the lady standing in the centre of a loom.
Behind her is a large convex mirror
surrounded by eight little convex mirrors,
each one of which acts as a sort of panel that tells her story.
What's interesting about his solution is that he nicks it off 'The Arnolfini Portrait'
because van Eyck does something similar with his mirror
when he surrounds it with the story of The Passion of Christ,
which is told in little roundels.
Holman Hunt was obsessed with this poem
and he approached it and depicted it again and again.
For the Pre-Raphaelites, this was a poem that was very much about an artistic dilemma.
How do you live a life of beauty and freedom and imagination
and somehow bring that out into the real world without,
like the Lady of Shalott, expiring?
So for them it was about reconciling a life of the imagination
with a life of the real.
… But in her web she still delights
To weave the mirror's magic sights,
For often thro' the silent nights
A funeral, with plumes and lights
And music, went to Camelot:
Or when the moon was overhead,
Came two young lovers lately wed;
"I am half-sick of shadows,"
said, The Lady of Shalott.