The postcard reproduction of John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott (1888) is a perennial bestseller at the Tate Britain gift shop. This popularity mirrors Victorian public response to the artist’s work, which was greeted with acclaim at the Royal Academy throughout the late nineteenth century. In the intervening years, however, Waterhouse’s popular appeal has become divorced from artistic and scholarly opinion, and there has been little academic attention paid to his painting or his...