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Hi, I'm just curious about your picture-painting of a young woman looking at a knight. I'm not sure if you had this question before but could you tell me the history behind that particular painting please? Long-time follower, first-time asker. Thanks.

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Sure! It’s John William Waterhouse’s La Belle Dame sans Merci (“The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy”), a figure from John Keats’ ballad of the same title who was, like many siren-like women from myth and lit, the subject of several Victorian/pre-Raphaelite paintings - examples: Frank Dicksee, Frank Cadogan Cowper, Henry Rheam, Arthur Hughes.

Basically the ballad tells of a narrator who comes upon a “haggard and woe-begone” knight, who in turn describes a woman - the titular Lady Without Mercy - with wild eyes and long hair, who enraptures him, frolics in fields with him, and then lulls him to sleep. As he sleeps, he has a nightmare about dead kings, princes, and knights, presumably all men who had succumbed to the Lady’s charms, and they warn him “La Belle Dame sans Merci/Hath thee in thrall”, whereupon he wakes up in the dazed and lonely state the narrator finds him in. 

So yeah! La Belle Dame sans Merci. 

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Basically a variation of the femme fatale siren-type figure. Waterhouse (and a lot of writers/artists of that era, in general) liked those…. you see with that in LamiaHylas and the Nymphs, and The Siren


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