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William Holman Hunt: The Lady of Shallott 1900.
Some 50 years after the founding of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Hunt the last survivor of the PRB, paints the epitome. From the last stanza of part 3 of Tennyson’s 1842 poem, Hunt paints the dramatic curse falling upon The Lady of Shallott.
A life-long spiritual eccentric, Hunt was given to wearing Eastern Robes - Arab Djellabas - and he was wearing one for his photographic portrait, recorded on wet-collodion plates by Julia Margaret Cameron, at Brent Lodge in Hendon, in 1864. His mission, expressed through the formation of the Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, was to return painting to the absolutism of realism, detailed observation, and a kind of spiritual integrity they detected in the paintings of the period before the High Renaissance - of the period before Raphael. Hunt's The Lady of Shallot was probably the last Pre- Raphaelite painting - because, although producing preliminary sketches for this subject to include in Edward Moxon's 1857 illustrated edition containing the poem (there are several pencil-sketches of various treatments, plus one or two engravings of this work, he did not start the painting until 1886 when Hunt was approaching sixty, and he did not finish the painting until 1900, when he was 73. His masterpiece then, has all the power you might expect from a meticulous painter and an artist as adept at interpreting Tennyson, as Tennyson was of interpreting Malory and the material of the Arthurian legend.
"She left the web, she left the loom, * She made three paces through the room, * She saw the water-lily bloom,* She saw the helmet and the plume,* She look'd down to Camelot.* 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.”
from Alfred Tennyson: The Lady of Shallot 1842