The presence of “arras [tapestries] green and blue, showing a gaudy summer morn” in the palace's first room signifies the inescapable role of art and creative media in humans' perception of the world. Tennyson's questioning of the life of the artist lies at the foundation of both “The Palace of Art” and “The Lady of Shalott,” which were published together in the collection
Poems. The inclusion of tapestries in “The Palace of Art” serves as a bridge to “The Lady of Shalott” and an intentional overlapping of content and themes between the two poems.
The Lady of Shalott creates her art at a forced distance from the society she depicts, and even then she can only participate in that world indirectly by translating what she sees through the mirror onto her loom:
There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.
She knows not what the curse may be,
And so she weaveth steadily,
And little other care hath she,
The Lady of Shalott.
The artist in “The Palace of Art” chooses to sequester his soul in the palace as an escape and freedom from the mess of society, but—like the Lady of Shalott—she finds the removal and isolation unbearable and counterproductive to the creation of meaningful art.
William Holman Hunt's painting The Lady of Shalott shows the artist surrounded by finished tapestries on the walls around her mirror as she stands in the midst of an unfinished work. The scene emphasizes the artist's total immersion in her art as she gazes down at the work underway, colored in gold and blues. The same effect dominates “The Palace of Art” as the reader tours the rooms, courts and mosaics that fill the structure with artistic representations of the world past and present. The mention of “arras” in the first room stands out in the poem, because tapestry is the only medium mentioned in the sequence of rooms.
The explicit inclusion of tapestry as the medium of choice simultaneously indicates an awareness of the medium's significance and makes clear the connection in theme with “The Lady of Shalott.” Though the self-contained, rhyming form of the quatrains that describe the rooms creates the impression of segmented and isolated environments, the reference to works of art within the palace and the implicit relation to “The Lady of Shalott” undermines the isolation of the rooms' environments. The fact that tapestries are needed to create the impression of the rooms' worlds demonstrates an awareness of the importance of art in understanding and recording reality as it unfolds around us.
The cycle of observation, representation and reference in the production of artwork presents the seemingly unresolvable tension between art and reality in “The Palace of Art” and “The Lady of Shallot”; art is necessary to humans' understanding of the world, but media and artists introduce subjective distortions into artistic representations of reality. Hunt's painting and the countless other instances of the Lady of Shallot in other works of art illustrate artists' reliance on past art and mythology to enfold complex meaning in their creations.
The Pre-Raphaelites strive to create a new set of styles and symbols to provide that depth—and the pervasive presence of the Lady of Shallot indicates an acute awareness of the problematic position of the artist within society. The brotherhood's reaction against what they perceive as failed schools of art does indeed spur a distinctive set of styles and themes, but that set nevertheless relies on pre-existing art and symbolism to enrich its significance.
