"The Lady of Shalott" by Walter Crane, RWS (1845-1915) (original) (raw)

The Lady of Shalott. 1862. Oil on canvas. 9 1/2 x 11 1/2 inches (24.1 x 29.2 cm). Collection of the Yale Center for British Art, accession no. B1986.24. Image courtesy of Yale Center for British Art under a Creative Commons Zero licence (CCO). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

Crane showed this picture at the Royal Academy in 1862, no. 359, the first of only two paintings that Crane was to exhibit at that institution. It was purchased by a Mr. Brown of Selkirk who then commissioned Crane to paint a companion painting The Lady of Shalott at Camelot "showing the Lady of Shalott having drifted down on her barge to Camelot to the wonderment of the knights and dames of Arthur's court" (Crane 71). Crane submitted this work to the Royal Academy the following year where it was promptly rejected. Crane's paintings were based on Alfred Tennyson's poem "The Lady of Shalott" first published in 1833. Crane's initial picture shows the dark-haired lady dressed all in white, symbolic of her purity, and laid out in her boat as she floats down to Camelot. The time of the day is twilight as she drifts by a forest covered in dense vegetation. The picture captures well this stanza from Part IV from the 1842 version of the poem:

Lying, robed in snowy white
That loosely flew to left and right —
The leaves upon her falling light —
Thro' the noises of the night
She floated down to Camelot:
And as the boat-head wound along
The willowy hills and fields among,
They heard her singing her last song,
The Lady of Shalott.

The subject of the Lady of Shalott was extremely popular with Victorian artists, particularly those within the Pre-Raphaelite circle. Paintings or drawings are known by D.G. Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal, William Holman Hunt, Arthur Hughes, J.N. Paton, William Maw Egley, Sidney Meteyard, John William Waterhouse, E.R. Hughes, and John Atkinson Grimshaw. The closest painting to that by Crane, however, is by the American John La Farge of c.1862, now at the New Britain Museum of Art. La Farge was certainly aware of the work of the Pre-Raphaelites by this time.

Contemporary Reviews of the Painting

Not surprisingly, because this was the first work exhibited by Crane as a young unknown artist, this picture was not widely reviewed. The critic of The Art Journal did mention it in passing, however: "The Lady of Shalott (350), W. Crane, is among the smallest, though more worthy to have been painted large than many around them" (135).

Bibliography

Crane, Walter. An Artist's Reminiscences. London: Methuen & Co., 1907. 70-71.

Konody, Paul G. The Art of Walter Crane. London: George Bell & Sons, 1902. 93.

The Lady of Shalott. Art UK. Web. 14 November 2025.

"The Royal Academy." The Art Journal New Series I (June 1, 1862): 129-38.

"Walter Crane, 1845–1915, The Lady of Shalott, 1862." Yale Centre for British Art. Web. 14 November 2025.

Created 14 November 2025