La Belle Dame Sans Merci

La Belle Dame Sans Merci, painted in 1893 and now at the Hessian State Museum in Darmstadt, takes its subject from Keats's 1819 ballad about a knight entranced by a supernatural 'beautiful lady without mercy' who leaves him cold and alone on a hillside. The poem was central to Pre-Raphaelite and late Victorian art — it had previously been painted by Henry Meynell Rheam, Frank Dicksee, and Arthur Hughes, among others — and its image of a beautiful woman who enchants and destroys men connected directly to the period's broader femme fatale mythology. Waterhouse's version, in the fertile creative year that also produced Hylas and the Nymphs, Hamadryad, and A Naiad, shows him at the peak of his engagement with this vein of literary mythology.

The composition stages the knight in thrall to the Belle Dame, his physical and emotional surrender expressed through posture and the composition's weight distribution. The Belle Dame's figure — beautiful, other, composed — contrasts with the knight's clearly enraptured state. An autumnal landscape provides the ballad's appropriate seasonal setting of fading and loss.