1849 -1917 · Rome, London, Royal Academy and late Pre-Raphaelitism

Literary heroines, threatening water and symbolic flowers make John William Waterhouse the great storyteller of late Pre-Raphaelitism.

John William Waterhouse was born in Rome in 1849 to British painter parents and grew up in London through contact with their studio. Joining the Royal Academy Schools in 1870, he exhibited in 1874. His first works favored Greco-Roman Antiquity and scenes of Italian life, with a clear composition inherited from academic painting. From the 1880s, Waterhouse turned more towards poetry, Shakespeare, Keats and Arthurian legends. From the 1880s, Waterhouse turned more towards poetry, Shakespeare, Keats and Arthurian legends. He shared with the Pre-Raphaelites a taste for color, precise nature and female figures charged with symbol, while retaining a freer touch. Ulysses and the mermaids transformed the Homeric episode into an attack circular, while Penelope and the suitors contrast loom work with male pressure. Lamia, Pandora and Miranda depict the moment when desire, curiosity or catastrophe becomes irreversible. Waterhouse often paints his heroines at the edge of a passage: bank, threshold, box, mirror or forest. Elected academician, he remained active until his death in 1917. His work united classical culture, Victorian literature and the immediately readable power of the painted story. The selection "John William Waterhouse" notably compares Ulysses and the mermaids and Penelope and the suitors. His reading favors space.

Waterhouse chooses the moment before the consequence: the hand approaches, the gaze hesitates and the whole landscape seems to know what is going to happen.