Paintings of Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott from Pre-Raphaelites

• Main Authors: Hu, Chia-Chi, 胡嘉綺
• Other Authors: Chen ,Kuang-Yi
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/95838216027390244094

碩士 === 國立臺灣藝術大學 === 造形藝術研究所 === 99 === After Industrial Revolution, British became the most powerful country in the world. At that time, some underlying social problems emerged, so some people hope to restore ancient ways and rethink these social issues. Rebuilding the medieval Utopia had become the most "avant-garde" aesthetic. Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shalott” in 1832 was a representative of the spirit of the Middle Age. He liked the medieval legend of King Arthur and created his poem. This poem not only expressed sad love story, but also led people to move back to the industrial development. The poem also inspired the painters like Pre-Raphaelites who wanted to rebuild the medieval utopia, especially the two painters W.H. Hunt (1827-1910) and J.W. Waterhouse (1849-1917). They painted many paintings about this subject. Not only these two painters, but also the other Pre-Raphaelites painters had been addicted to this subject. Through the interpretation of these painters, Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott had been known to the public. Although these painters were all inspired form same poem, they used different elements to compose their paintings. These elements could be seemed as different symbols. So through different interpretations by artists, all the paintings can show ideology of painters, and had infiltrated society and the values of the time. All these paintings have been triggered from Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott, a tragedy of love and pastoral feelings and turned into painters of the era with awareness and self-expression. The result was like John Ruskin’s (1819-1900) theory “another poems”. So the main issues of this thesis were in which way Pre-Raphaelites represent the subjects of The Lady of Shalott？Then go into the details of the symbols in these pictures. The artists intended to create such works into the symbolic representation of the different reasons for consideration.