La belle dame sans merci

La Belle Dame Sans Merci, painted in 1901 and held by Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, takes its subject from John Keats's 1819 ballad depicting a knight enchanted and destroyed by a supernatural woman. Dicksee's treatment belongs to a long Victorian tradition of paintings based on the Keats poem — Frank Cadogan Cowper, John William Waterhouse, and Arthur Hughes had all engaged with the subject — making it one of the defining images of Victorian-era Romantic imagination. The femme fatale figure — the beautiful woman without mercy — was one of the central subjects of Symbolist and Victorian art, reflecting anxieties about female sexuality and power that ran throughout the culture of the period. Dicksee's version is typically accomplished: the knight in armour, the supernatural woman with flowing hair, the dreamlike forest setting. Bristol's collection preserves an important example of late Victorian academic painting at its most technically assured and culturally representative.

Oil on canvas with Dicksee's polished, confident technique. The palette is rich and warm in the foreground figures — knight and enchantress — against a cooler, more diffuse forest background. Costume and hair are painted with the decorative attention typical of Victorian medievalism.