J.W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite
Royal Academy, until 13 September
Supported by Champagne Perrier-Jouet
Just what is it that makes John William Waterhouse (1849–1917) so different, so appealing? (As Richard Hamilton might put it.) And in what way is he so modern? It certainly isn’t an off-putting or radical modernity, for the exhibition in the Sackler Galleries has been doing brisk business, and the day I visited it was scarcely possible to view the pictures for the crowds. The shires must be empty these days, and indeed I hear that the only place to recapture the old peaceful museum experience of actually being able to see art in a public gallery without being jostled and shunted is outside London. I’m off on a research trip next week to the north and will report back in due course with my findings…
Of course, currently the Pre-Raphaelites are immensely popular — though it’s salutary to remember that just half-a-century ago you could buy them for what today amounts to loose change — and any show with that magic tag is guaranteed to attract the punters. Interesting that the organisers deemed it necessary to tell potential audiences that Waterhouse was a Pre-Raphaelite. You wouldn’t have to do that for Rossetti, Millais or Holman Hunt, but Waterhouse, like John Brett, is an altogether less familiar figure, though his masterpiece ‘The Lady of Shalott’ is well known and much loved. Waterhouse came late to the Pre-Raphaelite feast, being born the year after the Pre-Raphaelites were founded, and reaching maturity as the second phase of the Brotherhood came to an end with the death of Rossetti in 1882. After that, under the mostly benign reign of Burne-Jones, Pre-Raphaelitism was gradually subsumed into international Symbolism. Was then Waterhouse a Pre-Raphaelite or a Symbolist?
If a Pre-Raphaelite, he was rather a late-flowering one, though it’s much more optimistic to view him as forward-looking, hence the epithet ‘modern’. In fact, Waterhouse initially came under the influence of Alma-Tadema, and painted what might be called classical genre scenes, intensely literary subjects set in ancient Greece or Rome. These allowed him plenty of scope for demonstrating such skills as well-realised figures in architectural settings (modelling and perspective), intricate compositions and the artful depiction of all the varied stuffs of voluminous drapery. These paintings tend to be highly competent, but there is something missing from them, a distinguishing quality that Waterhouse had yet to find within himself.
It wasn’t until 1886 that he ‘discovered’ the complex delights of Millais’s great painting ‘Ophelia’, and that at a time when he was also feeling the pull of more contemporary modes — the new French-based realism of Bastien-Lepage, translated to England by the Newlyn painters grouped around Stanhope Forbes. The new spontaneity vied with the more controlled and claustrophobic ‘naturalism’ of the Pre-Raphaelites, and Waterhouse sought a middle path of his own devising. He favoured a freer handling than any true PRB painter would have allowed, but painted typical Pre-Raphaelite subjects, though giving them a strange Symbolist twist. Herein lies his originality — not so much as a technician, but in terms of the emotional tempo of his work.
The typical Waterhouse image has a melancholy, yearning look, a covert and dreamy sensuality which arouses without challenging, occasionally tipping over into something altogether nastier, as in the depictions of the evil-doing Circe. The Academy’s show of some 40 paintings (together with drawings and sketchbooks) is a good size, but begins rather tamely. The early classical scenes are too cool to hold the attention for long, though there is a solitary watercolour in the first gallery, ‘Scene at Pompeii’ (c.1877), which has a beguiling freshness that makes one wish for more. The painting next to it, ‘Dolce Far Niente’ (1880), has some very lovely still-life elements, but the room is dominated by glimpses of a painting in the next gallery, ‘The Magic Circle’.
This tall upright, dating from several years later, is eye-catching partly because of the cunning composition (the half-drawn circle, the vertical column of smoke checked by the horizontal brake of the cliffs), and partly owing to its colour. The sorceress wears a robe of exquisitely varied blue, which is echoed in the colour of the smoke rising from her cauldron. It’s a striking and memorable image, as is ‘St Eulalia’ from the year before, hanging nearby. In this scene of Roman martyrdom, the youthful saint’s half-naked and radically foreshortened body (the feet looking almost severed from the legs), lying in the falling snow among doves and pigeons, has an odd frisson of sensuality. This is the authentic Waterhouse touch, a stirring of feelings perhaps not usually associated with a gruesome death.
The second half of this main gallery contains ‘The Lady of Shalott’, always impressive, and to her right the deadly Circe in appropriately poisonous colours, tall beyond belief yet utterly convincing. In the centre of the room is a flat cabinet of sketchbooks, including a lovely drawing of an apple branch with fruit. Here too is the beautifully coloured intensity of ‘St Cecilia’ and the gentle, unapologetic sensuality of ‘A Naiad’ (1893). In the long end-room, just as the visitor begins to tire of soppy expressions on naked girls, a masterpiece emerges in ‘Hylas and the Nymphs’ (1896), in which the pale limbs of the nymphs emerge like lotus buds from the lake. There are other fine things here, such as ‘Windflowers’, the minatory ‘Gather Ye Rosebuds’ and a silky ‘Ariadne’, if you can get near enough to study them enjoyably.
The exhibition has been organised jointly by the RA and the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands, where it showed earlier this year, and it travels to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada (1 October 2009 to 7 February 2010). It is accompanied by a lavish catalogue (£18.95 softback) and deserves to be as big a success there as it has been here. There’s nothing like a lucid narrative painter with a touch of darkness to attract the crowds.
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