The Lady of Shalott, John William Waterhouse
Original is in the Tate, Britain. There is a high-resolution zoomable image on the Google Art Project, and a downloadable version of that file on Wikimedia Commons.
I almost hesitated to feature this image; Waterhouse’s interpretation of the scene from Tennyson’s poem is so commonly reproduced, it’s almost a cliché — but the fact that there is a high-resolution version available online now is too good to pass up.
Unfortunately, though the reproductions on the Google Art Project are usually pretty good in terms of color balance — better in many cases than the images posted on the websites of the museums themselves — I don’t think that’s the case here.
I haven’t had the chance to see this painting in person (yet), but my instinct is that the version on the Tate website is more accurate in this case. The Google Art Project version seems dark and over-saturated in the reds.
I’ve used the Tate image as the full image (above, top), and then taken the liberty to adjust the color on the Google version to try to bring it a bit closer to that before using it for my detail crops.
Even if inaccurate, it’s a delight to see Waterhouse paintings reproduced in detail. You can find more high-res Google Art Project images of Waterhouse paintings here and here.
There is an article devoted to this painting on Wikipedia.
In that article and elsewhere, you will often see Waterhouse mentioned as a “Pre-Raphaelite” painter, but that’s not really accurate. Though he was certainly much influenced by them and shared many of their subjects, he was actually a generation younger, and adopted a much looser and more painterly approach.
For more, see some of my previous posts on John William Waterhouse.
