J. W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite
27 June - 13 September, 2009
Supported by Perrier Jouet
Royal Academy Of Arts - Admission Charge
John William Waterhouse was born in 1849, the year of the founding of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Though born in Rome, his parents removed to England when he was young and in 1871, he was admitted to the Royal Academy as a student of sculpture. However, he soon turned to painting.
In 1874, his allegorical painting, Sleep and His Half Brother Death, was accepted for the Academy’s annual exhibition. Every year until 1916, with the exception of 1890 and 1915, he showed a painting there. He died in 1917. By then, his aesthetic had passed out of fashion but eighty-three years later, Waterhouse hit the headlines when the Andrew Lloyd-Webber Art foundation acquired his painting St Cecilia (1895) for £6.6 million.
Since the musical entrepreneur never makes a mistake, this acquisition has sparked something of a Waterhouse ‘revival’, leading to the JW Waterhouse: The Modern Pre Raphaelite exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. The exhibition is divided into six sections. In Youthful Experiments (1871-1881), you can see Sleep and His Half Brother Death alongside paintings like Dolce Far Niente (Sweetly Doing Nothing, 1879). In it we see a remarkably foreshortened young woman reclining on an oriental rug. In one hand, she is clutching a fan of ostrich feathers. In the other, she is blowing plucked feathers into the air. The attention to detail is extraordinary; the marble of the walls and the paving on the floor, the sunflower in the vase beside her, the fluffiness of the feathers. This level of draughtsmanship was doubtless acquired during his Academy years.
Building a Career, 1881 – 1885.
In 1884, Waterhouse painted Consulting the Oracle, a pointer to his eschewing classicism in favour of more Romantic themes, including the occult and the potency of women. In it, we see a group of seven women seated in a semi-circle around a kind of altar. Two candle-stands with tripods fashioned in the form of animal legs stand on either side of the altar. An eighth woman is standing in front of the altar and seems to be intently listening to something close by. The women are dressed in oriental clothes and seated upon Turkish rugs. In the background, fretwork screens cover three windows, one of which is open so that we can see the bright sunlight outside. This accentuates the dark and creepy interior in which the women are seated:
The Oracle of Teraph was a human head cured with spices
which was fixed against the wall and lamps being lit before it and other rites
performed, the imagination of diviners was so excited that they supposed that
they heard a low voice speaking future events…(Press Copy)
Associate of the Royal Academy, (1885 – 1895)
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| John William Waterhouse The Lady of Shalott, 1888 Oil on canvas 153 x 200 cm Tate: Presented by Sir Henry Tate, 1894 Photo © Tate, London 2009 |
In 1888 Waterhouse painted what is probably his most famous painting of all. Visitors to Tate Britain will be familiar with the Lady Of Shalott, Waterhouse’s evocation of the scene from the poem by Tennyson, when the Lady leaves her tower to try to live in the ‘real’ world, and meets with death. Here, curator Robert Upstone points out how this painting relates to French art of the same period, with its loose brushwork and links to symbolism. Artists like Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau offered
fantasy, dream and hypersensitivity to experience in
place of the straight or idealized naturalism and realism that reflected the
material world. Style was not at stake but a transmitting of the image of the
artist as a poetic visionary through subject matter and artistic means. (Yale
Dictionary of Art)
As time went on, Waterhouse drew increasingly on literature and mythology for his subject matter. Nor did he shy away from the verboten Victorian subject of sex. In A Naiad (1893), a young and naked female is clambering from a river to the bank where a male subject is reclining, no doubt to tempt him.
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| John William Waterhouse Circe Individiosa; Circe poisoning the Sea 1892 Oil on canvas 180.7 x 87.4 cm South Australian Government Grant, 1892 Art Gallery of South Australia |
Royal Academician (1895 – 1910)
These themes of water, women and sex is continued in his later paintings. In Hylas and the Nymphs (1896), Waterhouse repeats the motif of the group of seven women. The nymphs, surrounded by lily flowers, are luring the beautiful, young Hylas to his watery death. The language of flowers was important to Waterhouse. In 1883, he had married the flower painter, Esther Kenworthy, a move that no doubt had an effect upon his magnificent rendering of plants and blossoms.
Gather Ye Rosebuds (1908) was an evocation of the poem by Robert Herrick while in Ariadne (1898), we see the subject laid out on a stone bed, surrounded by growing pansies, poppies and camellias as her lover sails away on the background. Two panthers, symbols of Bacchus, crouch on the ground underneath.The Final Years (1910-1917)
Waterhouse continued to be prolific right to the end of his life. In 1915, as if knowing his days were numbered, he painted an earlier scene from the poem by Tennyson, one that shows the Lady of Shalott at her embroidery frame. In the exhibition, this painting is cleverly twinned with Penelope, the heroine of Ulysses, as she works her famous tapestry. There are many more beautiful paintings on view – do go to see them.
Mary Phelan, 2009