Waterhouse's best-known treatment of Tennyson's Lady of Shalott, painted in 1888, shows her after the mirror has cracked, setting out from her tower in a boat toward Camelot and her death. This later painting returns to the same source material at a different point in Waterhouse's career, part of a wider pattern in his work of revisiting subjects he had already treated once, developing them again as his style and interests shifted over time.

By the time Waterhouse painted his second version of the subject, The Lady of Shalott already had a substantial history in Pre-Raphaelite art. Elizabeth Siddal had painted the Lady at her loom in the 1850s, and William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti both illustrated the poem for Edward Moxon's 1857 edition of Tennyson's Poems, Hunt choosing the moment of entanglement at the loom and Rossetti the final scene of Lancelot discovering the Lady's body at Camelot^[1][2]. Hunt later expanded his illustration into a large, independent painting built around the Lady's mirror, the device the poem makes essential to her fate^[3].

Waterhouse painted at least three treatments of the Lady of Shalott across his career, of which this is one, a pattern consistent with his wider habit of returning to favourite literary and mythological subjects at different points as his style developed, rather than treating any single painting as a final or definitive statement on a theme. He trained and exhibited chiefly through the Royal Academy in London, moving between subjects drawn from Homer, Ovid, Arthurian legend and Tennyson across a long working life, and the Lady of Shalott, revisited here for at least a second time, sat among the small group of subjects he found himself returning to most often.