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Video: What curse did the "Lady of Shallot" suffer from, and What confused critics in Waterhouse's painting?
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Elaine, a beautiful lady from the Isle of Shallot, who was masterfully depicted on his canvas by the Pre-Raphaelite John William Waterhouse. According to the plot of the English poem, a mysterious curse is imposed on the girl: she can only look at the world through a mirror and is forced to spin constantly. What is the tragedy of the image? And why did art critics see a French hint on the canvas of the English artist?
Poem by Tennyson
This painting illustrates Alfred Tennyson's poem The Sorceress Shallot. This poem, first published in 1832, tells the story of a young woman named Elaine of Astolat who suffers from a mysterious curse. She lives in isolation in a tower on an island called Shallot, by the river that flows from King Arthur's castle in Camelot. She can only look at the world through the reflection in the mirror. And then one day she notices the reflected image of the handsome knight Lancelot. Knowing about the curse, she still dared to look at him. And then the mirror shattered, and she felt the curse fall on her.
The heroine swims in her boat downstream to Camelot and "sings her last song." And later the girl dies before reaching the end of the river. The noble knight Lancelot sees the girl's dead body and praises her beauty. The poem was extremely popular among the Pre-Raphaelites, who were interested in the plots of Arturiana. A fine piece based on the poem is John William Waterhouse's Lady of Shallot.
About the artist
The Lady of Shallot is a famous oil painting by John William Waterhouse, who was a prominent member of the British Pre-Raphaelite movement in the 19th century. The work is considered the most famous in the work of the artist. Alfred Tennyson was a popular English poet among the Pre-Raphaelite fraternity. Waterhouse biographer Anthony Hobson says that the artist had a whole cycle of works written based on Tennyson's plots. Interestingly, Tennyson painted each page of the poem with pencil sketches for paintings.
In many ways, Waterhouse's painting "The Lady of Shallot" takes viewers forty years ago - in 1848, when the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded. One of the authors of the Art Journal noted: “The type of work that Waterhouse created for the damned lady, her actions and the clothes in which he dressed her, brings his work closer to the work of the Pre-Raphaelites of the middle of the century.
The plot of the picture and symbols
In the picture, we see a girl in a boat, over which a cloth is draped (as mentioned above, the girl had to spin all the time so that the curse would not fall on her). Waterhouse on her canvas reflects that tragic moment when the heroine releases the chain of the boat with her right hand, looking with bottomless and doomed eyes at the crucifix standing in front of three candles. Her mouth is parted (she sings her last song). Three candles symbolize life: two of them have already gone out, and the third is about to fade away. This is the author's tip - her life will end soon.
The heroine of the painting is presumably the artist's wife, the artist Esther Kenworthy. Waterhouse's album contains numerous sketches and sketches, completed 6 years before the completion of the work (1894). Waterhouse also sketched the final scenes in which the heroine's boat sails to Camelot.
Landscape
The landscape is very naturalistic. The painting was painted during a short period of Waterhouse's plein air painting. The location of the painting is not specified, but Waterhouse, along with colleagues, loved to visit the counties of Somerset and Devon, which were located along the coastline of Bristol Bay. It is likely that it was there that the artist found a landscape suitable for the plot.
By the way, the plot with a young red-haired woman in a white dress floating with the current in the coastal strip reminds many of John Everett Millais's Ophelia of 1852.
Many art critics saw notes of French style in the work of the representative of the English Pre-Raphaelites. The work impresses with impressive delicacy in the image of willow weeds and water. This style is more reminiscent of French art than the painting of English masters.
The Brotherhood's early work displayed meticulous attention to detail, reflecting John Ruskin's faithfulness to nature, which advocated an accurate reflection of landscapes and nature. But Waterhouse's technique is noticeably freer, which testifies to his experiments with French impressionism. Impressionism proposed a different concept of "fidelity to nature" based more on optical accuracy. This means the transfer of an image of an object or scene at a fleeting moment, taking into account the time of day and weather. Yes, Waterhouse drew inspiration from the plein air methods of the Impressionists.
John Waterhouse was one of the most talented artists in the British art movement. Despite initial remarks about the too “French” technique, The Lady of Shallot was eventually accepted by the art world as an “English” painting and was acquired by Henry Tate for his Museum of National Art, where it still holds a place of honor.
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