'The Lady of Shalott' by William Holman Hunt
This audio clip describes the painting The Lady of Shalott by William Holman Hunt (1827–1910).
It has been created for use as part of our primary school resource, The Superpower of Looking, in order to support pupils with blindness or visual impairment to take part in the lessons.
Explore the painting further in our resource, A lady, a curse and tales of King Arthur.
Full audio description text
This colourful canvas, about 44 centimetres high and 34 centimetres wide, shows the Lady of Shalott in a scene from a famous poem set at the time of King Arthur. The painting, by William Holman Hunt, was begun in 1886.
The Lady is standing in a room in a castle tower. The circular space is crammed with objects and highly decorated. Religious paintings in oval frames fill the curved wall behind the Lady, leaving little space uncovered. The repetition of ovals and circles brings the many things together.
In her 20s, the Lady is side onto us, her weight on her left leg, her left shoulder turned away and her head tipped forwards. She's wearing a tight-fitting brown and blue top over a cream-coloured shirt. Its rolled-up sleeves show her slender arms. Her left hand holds up her long red skirt revealing its pale pink underside and her cream-coloured silky petticoat, that ends just above her bare ankles and feet. She has pale skin and long fiery red hair. It is plaited close to her head but, escaping, flies out in a thick cloud above her. Tendrils reach up to a letter-box-shaped window high in the centre of the curved back wall.
The window shows blue sky and puffy white clouds. Beneath the window is a circular mirror. This reflects a view of a grassy field where men in colourful cloaks gather, perhaps for a tournament. A knight in armour on a horse watches them, his back to us. The scene is misty as it is not seen directly but is a reflection of a view through a castle window with slender columns and pierced stonework. A couple of lines crack the mirror's glass. At the bottom of the reflection is a section of tapestry on a circular frame.
The frame itself is a hoop that fills the room. The Lady stands within it on a green cloth that covers the floor instead of a carpet. The frame is a brass ring supported at her shin height on spiral legs. The plain white threads of a tapestry in progress span the frame. The far part of the weaving has been completed. The angle of our viewpoint makes it hard to see the design. Balls of thread – turquoise, blue, purple and gold – dangle from its unfinished edge. The Lady herself seems trapped. Threads coming loose from the tapestry are wrapping themselves around her skirts. Her skirts are also lifted, suggesting she has just climbed in over the frame or is about to step out.
White wooden slip-on shoes wait close by, towards the bottom right of the image. They have a single strap that is white, embroidered with green diamonds. To the right of the shoes is an elaborate glass stand. It looks a bit like a fountain, with a bowl halfway up, but actually holds six candles at the Lady's waist height. The candles are unlit, and diamond shapes cut into the glass reflect daylight. It spills into the room from the window which must be behind us and is pictured in the mirror. The shadow of one of the window's columns is cast across the floorcloth falling from the centre of the painting's bottom edge, towards the right. At the far end of this shadow, a white dove hovers above a tangle of embroidery threads. Another dove flutters on our side of the tapestry frame, and a third flies above the Lady's cloud of hair as if trying to escape through the letterbox window.
