John William Waterhouse: Every Painting We've Explained

John William Waterhouse painted women on the edge of a decision: a lady about to leave her tower, a sorceress about to poison a rival, a girl about to open a box she was told to leave closed. Few painters of the late nineteenth century are more recognisable, and few are more loved by people who otherwise care little for the Victorian age. This page gathers every essay we have written about him, with a short guide to his life and style.

Photograph of the painter John William Waterhouse, around 1886
John William Waterhouse, photographed by Hayman Seleg Mendelssohn, c. 1886. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Who was John William Waterhouse?

Waterhouse was born in Rome in 1849 to English parents who were both painters, and he spent his early childhood in Italy before the family settled in London. The classical world he grew up surrounded by never left his work. He trained at the Royal Academy Schools and first made his name with scenes of ancient Rome and Greece, painted in the polished academic manner that dominated the exhibitions of the 1870s and 1880s.

In the late 1880s his subjects changed. He turned increasingly to the poems of Tennyson, to Arthurian legend, to Shakespeare and to Greek myth, and to the kinds of stories that had inspired the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood a generation earlier. That is why he is often called “the modern Pre-Raphaelite”: he was never a member of the original group, which had formed in 1848, the year before he was born, but he took up their themes and their fascination with doomed and powerful women. He was elected a full Royal Academician in 1895, taught at the St John’s Wood Art School, and kept painting until his death in London in 1917.

What makes a Waterhouse painting recognisable?

Three things return again and again. The first is the model: a young woman with long auburn or dark hair, a pale oval face and a distant, absorbed expression, shown in the moment before or after an irreversible act. The second is the setting, which is usually water, a garden or an enclosed room, painted with a looser, more open brushwork than the smooth finish of his academic training. The third is the story. Waterhouse almost always painted a narrative, taken from literature, and he expected his viewers to know it.

His heroines are not passive decorations. Circe poisons the sea in which her rival bathes; the sorceress of The Magic Circle draws a ring of fire around herself; the Lady of Shalott chooses to break her curse, knowing it will kill her. That tension between beauty and agency is what keeps these pictures alive for modern viewers, and it is the thread that runs through our essays below.

Our essays on Waterhouse

Related: George Edward Robertson’s Lady of Shalott, a very different reading of the same poem.

Waterhouse in the print shop

Watch

On @SapiensVerbum: The Woman Who Poisoned the Wrong Person: Circe Invidiosa, and 4K art-and-music sessions with Psyche Opening the Golden Box and Miranda.

Explore more painters and themes on Explore Art.

Sources

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