The Waterhouse Exhibit, Montreal

Consulting the Oracle 1884

I’m going to quote directly from the Exhibit (book) concerning the above painting:

According the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, Teraphim were originally human heads, taken from first born male adults who had been sacrificed. Shaved, salted, spiced, and with a golden plate bearing magic words placed under the tongue, it was believed Teraphic heads could talk and give guidance. In twentieth-century excavations of Jericho, evidence of human skulls having been used as cult objects was discovered, supporting the existence of this practice. It is possible that the worship of the heads originated first as a fetish representative of ancestors, but gradually they came to be considered as oracular.

The Targum of the Pseudo-Jonathan was probably composed around the 15th Century C.E.. Human sacrifices (especially of first born children) by ancient Canaanites, as evidenced in the excavations of Jericho, Tyre, Sidon and Carthage, a colony of Tyre, were one of the practices so abhorent to the God of the Bible, and inquiring of the dead, one of the justifications given for Israel’s invasion and conquest of the land.

St. Eulalia 1885

Eulalia was martyred, gruesomely with iron hooks and torches applied to her body, in 304 C.E. at twelve years of age. At the moment of her death, white doves and snow are supposed to have fallen, extinguishing the flames. Waterhouse’s treatment is at once original in composition – the foreshortened figure of Eulalia is certainly unconventional – and beautiful. The snow has extinguished all trace of blood and flames. I must say that Eulalia’s figure, mature for a twelve year old, does not seem to bear any evidence of fire or torture, for which I’m thankful, but I don’t imagine real martyrdom is so painless to behold.

The Magic Circle 1886

This painting, in spite of its occult subject, is one of Waterhouse’s best, I think. The sorceress isn’t an ideal beauty, as in later paintings. It appears to have an Egyptian locality, but the dress looks more Druidical and medieval English. The dress and the background are rendered natural and uncontrived by means of thin, liquid paint, brushed on with confidence.

The Waterhouse Exhibit, Montreal

Mariamne 1887
Mariamne was the second wife of Herod the Great, a very paranoid man. She was evidently so beautiful that Herod gave instructions that if he himself were to die, she should be put to death also, since Herod expected another man would want her once he himself was out of the way. He became convinced that she had committed adultery. In this painting, the Judges in the background have condemned her to death, a cowardly action in the face of little evidence, in order to please Herod. They may further have disliked her pride and outspokenness. Herod is portrayed as indecisive and agonized, wildly swinging from one emotion to another, as is characteristic of paranoids. Legend has it that Herod, loth to lose her entirely, kept her body preserved in honey for seven years afterward.

Cleopatra 1888
‘Where’s my serpent of the old Nile? For so he calls me.’
Antony and Cleopatra, William Shakespeare, Act 1

The Lady of Shalott 1888

(Click on any of these paintings for a large view.)
Simply my favorite painting in the whole world. Standing next to this painting, the Lady stands out from the background almost physically, owing to the muted background being painted thinly and the built-up, almost sculptured paint on the figure. This painting, which is large, was to some extent painted en plein air in order to render the landscape more real. It must have been very difficult to anchor so large a canvas in even a mild wind. However, it is utterly real to look upon. Definitely worth the trouble. Some of Waterhouse’s pastoral paintings of later years don’t look like real English countryside. This one does.

Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses 1891

The Waterhouse Exhibit, Montreal

Ulysses and the Sirens 1891

Apparently, in the Odyssey, there are only two Sirens. Waterhouse provides seven. Sirens are portrayed this way in Greek Vase Paintings, with women’s heads (All the better to sing, my dear) and bird’s bodies. I have always pictured them as mermaids of one sort or another, as Waterhouse does in a later painting. I love the Greek Ship and the Clashing Rocks though.

Cice Invidiosa 1892

The Hamadryad 1893

Speaking of Hamadryads (Greek tree nymphs), I came upon this poem by Edgar Allen Poe:

To Science

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!

Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.

Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,

Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,

Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering

To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,

Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?

And driven the Hamadryad from the wood

To seek a shelter in some happier star?

Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,

The Elfin from the green grass, and from me

The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

The Waterhouse Exhibit, Montreal

The Lady of Shalott 1894

Geneia particularly likes this painting of the Lady of Shalott. “The Lady” seems the perfect metaphor for Victorian womanhood, cloistered in a domestic world, racked with longing for freedom and the pursuit of passion. This painting illustrates the point in the story where she turns away from the mirror, in which (like Plato’s cave dwellers) she turns away from the shadowplay of the mirror and gazes full at Lancelot through the window. The mirror cracks (click on the painting to see it better) and she begins to die from that instant.

St. Cecilia 1895

Hylas and the Nymphs 1896

Keep going to Older Posts. They’re not older. You’re only half way through the Waterhouse Pictures.

The Waterhouse Exhibit, Montreal

Mariana in the South 1897

Mariana from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure is a heroine a la the Lady of Shalott. She is imprisoned by her bridegroom, Angelo, because her dowry is lost at sea….for five years. Who thinks these plots up? Meanwhile she contemplates her youth and beauty going to waste unloved. Well, that’s depressing….In the end, she is wed to Angelo by means of a trick and of her own consent. She still loves him. (A woman who would consent to marry such a man is an idiot, but since Shakespeare’s play ends at that point, she is spared the discovery that the cure is worse than the disease.)

Ariadne 1898

Ariadne was the daughter of Minos, the King of Crete. She fell in love with the Athenian Theseus when he was brought, along six other youths and seven maidens, to be sacrificed to her monster brother, the Minotaur. She helped Theseus slay the Minotaur and find his way out of the Labryrinth (identifed as the palace of the Knossos in Crete) and sailed away with him. He abandoned her in Naxos in the scene above. She was, of course, stricken to find she’d chosen the wrong man, but her next lover was true to her, AND he was a god: Dionysus, the god of wine and wild things. His panthers are already surrounding her, anticipating the next chapter in her story.

A Mermaid 1900

The Waterhouse Exhibit, Montreal

The Siren 1900

Destiny 1900

Of all Waterhouse’s paintings, Destiny has my vote for sheer prettiness. It’s something about the beauty of her face, the red dress and background, which is both simple and complex. It’s one of Waterhouse’s tricks to provide views in both directions, a complete world, while only looking in one.

Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus 1900

I’m doing paintings of Orpheus too, but I think I’ll avoid the floating head which continues to sing theme. (Orpheus was torn apart by Maenads, worshippers of Dionysus, who basically went up into the mountains, drank too much and really misbehaved.) His body was buried, but his head and lyre floated down the river Hebrus to the (Mediterranean) Sea.

The Waterhouse Exhibit, Montreal

Windflowers 1902

I want to paint grass like this.

Windflowers may just be a sort of anthropomorphic nature painting like his Boreas or Leighton’s Flaming June, or she might be Persephone out gathering anemones before Hades gallops up in his chariot and carries her off the to his gloomy underworld.

Pyche Opening the Door into Cupid’s Garden 1903

Echo and Narcissus 1903

Compare this landscape to the backdrop of the Lady of Shalott in her boat. It would be a beautiful place, if only it were real, but somehow, I just don’t think it’s real, no matter how many paintings it shows up in.

The Waterhouse Exhibit, Montreal

The Danaides 1906

When one thinks of it, Waterhouse painted just a few pathetic women (The Lady of Shalott and Mariana), but mostly he painted frightening women (Circe, Medea, the Sirens). These Danaide each murdered their husbands on their collective wedding night and were condemned to pour water into a perpetually flowing vessel….for eternity. Wait until you hear about Lamia.

Jason and Medea 1907

Here, Medea, the daughter of the King of Colchis and niece of the sorceress Circe, mixes a potion for Jason, the adventurer of the Argo. It will protect him against fire-breathing bulls and warriors that spring from dragon’s teeth and help him seize the Golden Fleece.

“I will begin with that, ‘twixt me and thee,

That first befell. I saved thee. I saved thee —

Let thine own Greeks be witness, every one

That sailed on Argo — saved thee, sent alone

To yoke with yokes the bulls of fiery breath,

And sow that Acre of the Lords of Death;

And mine own ancient Serpent, who did keep

The Golden Fleece, the eyes that knew not sleep.

And shining coils, him also did I smite

Dead for thy sake, and lifted up the light

That bade thee live. Myself, uncounselled,

Stole forth from father and from home, and fled

where dark Iolcos under Pelion lies,

With thee….

Medea, Euripides

(translated by Gilbert Murray)

The Soul of the Rose 1908