J.W. Waterhouse

The drawing for Flora sold for more than an Alma Tadema painting. The JW items all went well above the estimated range.

 It's interesting that the oil sketch for Love Phyltre was owned by the Kelley Gallery. I talked to the owner at the opening in Montreal and he'd just sold another he'd owned. It was a study for the Magic Circle which I'd held in my lap and considered buying 33 years ago at the Fine Arts Society in London. It was fifteen hundred pounds. It would have cost me much of my year in England and it just wasn't that great - just a rough. The sketch of Flora is a beauty. It's fun to see that girl, who appears in nearly all JWWs best paintings from the 1890s, looking so real. When she's drawn you can see the plain pretty girl without the spooky magical attitude. A lot has been made of how Waterhouse made all his models into Waterhouse girls, but studying the show it seemed to me that this one girl managed to show up in nearly all my favorites. With small variations, I believe she's Circe offering the cup, Circe Individiosa, A Hamadyrad, A Naiad, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, The 1894 Lady of Shallot, all three central Nymphs in Hylas and the Nymphs, Ariadme, and probably Mariana in the South and a few others. At the turn of the century she either disappeared or grew out of that look. 145 thousand pounds is lots of money but I think she's worth every penny!

Hi David
I enjoyed the drawing very much. JWs drawings to me are portraits of his models which sets them apart from his paintings which are more of types. This model however does seem to form the basis of his type, so it is great to see a drawing of her in such  wonderful detail. I've always thought he must have had a good reason for framing the preliminary for Flora and hanging it in his studio for so long.

I was suprised that the Logsdail with its portrait like rendition of JW, Esther and Feeney etc did not appear to sell at the auction.

Cheers
Neil

Cheers for the info, Neil. It's another pic I can put up on the webpage I did for Waterhouse, though I can't find any info on dimensions etc.

I thought it was interesting to note that The Love Philtre went for about half of what the Flora sketch went for. I thought it would have been the other way around considering the former to be an oil sketch.

 Howdy Neil, I'd certainly always thought of Waterhouse as having created his types, but after spending so many hours in the Montreal show, I felt it much more likely that he selected his types rather than creating them. The girl in that drawing is the center of Waterhouse's best decade. I could almost put it together looking at the show, but this drawing is like the Rosetta stone. Seeing her features rendered so graphically makes it much easier to map her onto the characters in the finished work. You can see other girls and women moving in and out of other periods too. They're certainly altered -- it's clear from the drawings that he idealized them a bit in the paintings -- they lost their chubby chins, etc. by the time they made it to the finished oils, but you can clearly see who is who in many of the pictures. You also see he had a finite supply of fabric that he loved to recycle. That fabric with the hoops gets draped over model after model in painting after painting. He even loves to recycle that bare stick wooded background. I don't want to make it sound like I'm criticizing, for me he's the greatest painter of all time, but it's fun to get glimpses into how he made his work since so much of its background is still lost. Does anyone know where this drawing came from? I don't see its previous owner listed.