"I am half sick of shadows," said the Lady of Shalott. It is the line that ends the second part of Tennyson's poem, and in 1915 Waterhouse chose it as the title of the third picture he painted of her. It is an oil on canvas of roughly 100 by 73 cm, signed and dated 1915 at the lower right. It was shown at the Royal Academy in 1916, which is why some sources date it to that year, and it now hangs in the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, a gift to the gallery in 1971.
The Lady who has had enough
His earlier Ladies are about the end of the story: the 1888 painting at the Tate shows her in the boat, and the 1894 painting in Leeds shows her turning from the loom to see Lancelot. This one comes before either. She sits sideways on a carved chair in a rose-red gown with puffed sleeves and a gold belt, both arms raised behind her head, and gazes out with a look that is somewhere between boredom and longing. The loom beside her holds an unfinished tapestry of looping blue and red patterns, and balls of yarn and shuttles are scattered across a black-and-white tiled floor.
What the mirror shows
In Tennyson's poem the Lady is forbidden to look at Camelot directly. She may only see it reflected in a mirror and weave what she sees. Waterhouse paints that mirror as a large round frame above the loom. In it are the pale towers of Camelot, a stone bridge over the river, and two tiny figures, the "young lovers lately wed" who make her say the words of the title. It is the first time the Lady has wanted something the mirror cannot give her.
Little-known facts
- It was one of Waterhouse's last major paintings. He was ill with cancer by this time and died in February 1917.
- The shuttles lying on the floor are shaped much like little boats, which has been read as a hint of the river journey she will take at the end of the poem.
- According to one provenance record, the painting was sold from a private estate in 1923 for 300 guineas.
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