John William Waterhouse

John William Waterhouse

John William Waterhouse was an English artist who lived from 1849 to 1917 who worked in the Pre-Raphaelite art style. Waterhouse continued to work in the Pre-Raphaelite style decades after the movement had peaked, earning him the nickname “the modern Pre-Raphaelite”.

Waterhouse was born in Rome, Italy to an English family and both of his parents were artists. His family moved back to England where they encouraged him to become an artist, often taking him to the British Museum and National Gallery to sketch.

In 1871, Waterhouse enrolled in the Royal Academy of Art. At first, he was studying to become a sculptor, before gravitating more towards painting. He showed works at most of their annual exhibitions for decades. In his early works, Waterhouse was particularly fond of depicting scenes from ancient Greek and Roman mythologies. In 1833, Waterhouse married a fellow artist, Esther Kenworthy. He continued the life of an academic artist, teaching at the St John’s Wood Art School and sitting on the council of the Royal Academy of Art.

In the paintings from his later years, Waterhouse was fond of depicting famous characters from literary works including Greek mythology, the Arthurian legend, and Shakespeare. Some of his more famous subjects include Elaine of Astolat from the King Arthurian legend, and Ophelia from Hamlet. He was a contemporary with Edmund Leighton, who painted the same lofty subjects.

The public loved his work, and he was very successful during his lifetime. His paintings were enormously popular and are still highly recognizable to the wider public today. The English composer, Andrew Lloyd-Webber is a huge collector of Waterhouse paintings. John William Waterhouse died in 1915 at age 68, from cancer, while he was working on his fourth painting in the ‘Ophelia series’.

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