A photograph of a Black woman in Reconstruction era dress, seated. Signed lower right.

Lady of the Lake is a fictionalised portrait of Anna Murray Douglass (1813-1882). Anna Murray Douglass helped liberate hundreds of people from enslavement, including her husband, the American Abolitionist Frederick Douglass (c.1818-1895). Anna Murray was a principal figure in the Underground Railroad, a network of linked safe houses and routes by which enslaved people secured their liberation and travelled North to free states and Canada. Lady of the Lake forms part of a series of works by Isaac Julien that explores the life of Frederick Douglass.