J.W. Waterhouse

... the 'Destiny' of Mr. J. W. Waterhouse, a little dream of colour; ...
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Artists were requested after their signature to write the words "War Fund, 1900," so that hereafter the pictures may be recognizable. All those who have worked towards the success of the scheme are to be congratulated.

In the same way those artists are important who work according to the demands of decorative painting. A picture in a room should be like a jewel in its setting, in harmony. It should fit agreeably into the scheme of decoration, its colour in unison, its lines melodious, its general effect toning well with the general design.

These principles, taught by Morris, have had a formative influence on the work of a large number of artists. There arose a tendency which, by borrowing characteristic effects from woodwork, carpets, and stained-glass, and by the application of style to line as well as to colour, went one step further than Burne-Jones.

The pictures of John W. Waterhouse, for instance, are not only conceived in literary vein, but seen with the eye of a painter. By smooth, thick lines, by the discordant harmony of blues, greens, and violets, he gets a carpet-like effect which is highly decorative.

Byam Shaw, still a young man, is just another master of decorative lines. At the age of twenty-five he painted the picture "Love's Baubles," which now hangs in the art gallery in Liverpool. The subject he took from a poem in Rossetti's "House of Life." Beautiful women snatch after the fruit which a boy carries along on a salver. The whole is a harmony of melodious lines and rich, quiet colours.
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Next to Byam Shaw, G.E. Moira is the chief representative of this decorative school.
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Maurice Greiffenhagen surprises one by the ardour of his imagination, his strong emphatic line, and the tapesty-like beauty of his colour. He reminds one of Aman-Jean, such a wonderful "old-master-like" beauty is suffused through the picture "The Sons of God looked upon the Daughters of Men." No less effective is the "gourmandise" with which he gives his interpretation the appearance of an old picture. The colours, though full of sound and movement, are at the same time so etiolated and faint that one would think the picture had hung for centuries in a dusty corner of an old church, or that spiders had spun their webs across it; the frame too is in keeping, and enhances the general effect of solemnity.

No 144. HYLAS AND THE NYMPHS
By John W. Waterhouse, R.A. (Born 1849)

It is interesting to compare the art of Mr. Waterhouse with that of Burne-Jones. Both are characterised by the choice of mythical and legendary subjects; but Burne-Jones retold these old-world stories with little or no realism. Mr. Waterhouse retells them as one would do who believed them. He adopts, that is to say, the point of view of those who did believe them. In this picture, for example, illustrating the incident in the Odyssey, where Hylas, the youthful companion of Ulysses, goes to draw fresh water for the voyagers, and is carried away by the water-nymphs, we have a very real Hylas, very real nymphs, and an equally real pool. Even when Burne-Jones was representing mere fact, as in the "Sibylla Delphica"--for priestesses did serve the temples--his pictures have no air of realism. Mr. Waterhouse, we may note, has made his nymphs rise from among the water-lilies,and wear lily-blooms in their hair, because nymphaea is the botanical name for the water-lily. We may perhaps with advantage to some readers comment on the objection we have heard made that there is too strong family-likeness between the nymphs. This is because they are nymphs, and not a party of girls. They resemble each other as the water-lilies they personify resemble each other. Note how the greens in the picture get value by contrast with the colour of the garments of Hylas and of the lily-blooms, as well as with the flesh-tints. The artist is the son of a painter. He was born in Rome, and trained in his father's studio and in the Academy Schools.

Of the painters who, coming later than those just mentioned [Holman Hunt, Millais], have also drawn their inspiration from myth and legend, Mr. J. W. Waterhouse should perhaps be mentioned first. His work at once invites comparison with that of Burne-Jones, because he chose much the same kind of subjects, such as the Greek myths and Arthurian legend. There is a marked difference, however, in the spirit in which the two men have approached such subjects. With Burne-Jones we are clearly in dreamland; Mr. Waterhouse takes us among flesh-and-blood realities. If he were painting scenes from contemporary life he could hardly make them more realistic. The people who believed the mythical and legendary stories must, we think, have thought of them in this way. The figures are realistic, and so are their surroundings. The landscape of his Hylas and the Nymphs has been studied on the spot, and is realised with only less than Pre-Raphaelite literalness. Hylas, and the nymphs who are casting their spell over him, are equally real. The story is being enacted before our eyes. It is so with his Lady of Shalott, both where the curse comes upon her and where she is drifting down the river in her boat, and, indeed with all his pictures. Leighton's formal compositions, with their decorative colour, and Burne-Jones's elaborate designs, the figures in which are intended only to be types, keep us far away from naturalism. In Mr. Waterhouse's work there is less formality in the design, and though the same face may appear again and again to play many different parts, the expression is always varied to suit the parts. Mr. Waterhouse is the son of a painter. He was born in Rome in 1849, and though he was brought to England when only five years old, he was an impressionable child, and the early years spent in the land of romance were probably not the least important in determining his career and the particular direction his art-work would take. That he could look back to treasuring a bit of Pompeian fresco when he was hardly beyond infancy, must have helped to draw him towards the old-time stories he has retold with a naturalism that might almost be called simple.
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[Other painters discussed are Sir William Blake Richmond, Frank Dicksee, Arthur Hacker, Herbert Draper, Thomas Cooper Gotch, Charles H. Shannon, and Maurice Greiffenhagen where we pick up the thread once more]
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Mr. Greiffenhagen's The Sons of God looked upon the Daughters of Men is so powerful that the sonorousness of the Biblical language, and its mystic significance, seem to have been merely transposed from sound into colour. Here it is impossible not to think of Watts, but by no means as if there had been mere imitation or plagiarism. His Idyl in the Liverpool Art Gallery, strong in colour and fine in draughtsmanship, is as elemental--is an as simply profound interpretation of the passionate love of youth and maiden--as Madox Brown's Romeo and Juliet. We have got far away now from the cold Classicism of Leighton and Poynter, further still from the merely decorative loveliness of Albert Moore; and there is warmer blood here than that which courses along the veins of Mr. Waterhouse's people.