The Lady of Shalott is one of John William Waterhouse‘s representative works. What we can see is in the gloomy thorn jungle, a pretty blonde in long white dress sat in the bow. She raised his head slightly and her eyes full of bitterness. Do you couldn’t stop wondering that why she looked so sad, why the three candles set in the bow, or why her hands shackled by the chain? All of these bring us to another world. So what happened behind this painting? What does the painter want to tell us?

Actually, all the elements in this oil painting, no matter the gesture, arrangement or the image, are comes from a beautiful and sad literary allusions which Tennyson wrote in his long verse The Lady of Shalott. This poem described a girl of congenital deficiency name Shalott who has to live in the shadow and mustn’t step into the sunlight, what she could do was doing embroidery repeatedly and seeing her residence and the scenery outside the window through the image projected by the mirror, but all the images were unreal. One day, she suddenly

world.