Blog post#5 Pre impressionism & Pre Raphaelites

John William Waterhouse

John William Waterhouse was an English painter of the Victorian era. His gain his popularity from series of large-scale Classical mythological subjects paintings. In 1970, He studied sculpture at the Royal Academy in London and then, later on, switched to painting. He was known for glowing colour, texture brush stroke, and visible surface. Like all other Pre Raphaelite artist, he had a strong passion for illustrating beautiful women portraits in a stunning outfit in the middle of some natural English countryside scenes.

In The Peristyle 1874 – I really enjoy looking at this painting. The scene look natural, believable and it is a really interesting way to capture a ordinary scene. How he chose to pose the little girl feeds the bird makes the painting look somewhat like a photograph. More over, think that this painting has a really lovely color palette which many warm tones

Early in Waterhouse career, he was more like a Neo classical painter who would create painting of Greek and Roman scenes, as a result these painting would have the same subject, in some case it even have similar composition.

Between 1890s and 1990s Waterhouse produced many works of the mythological and daily life scenes which was exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy. As a result, the academy made him as their associate member in 1885 and then a full Royal Acedemician in 1895.

**Boreas-1903**– I like this woman expression and the way waterhouses illustrated her scarf. There are lots of texture in this painting which makes my eyes move around to really acknowledge all details. Because he painted this piece with mainly cool tone so the pink color on the girl cheek really pop out.

Waterhouse was really famous with his painting of ” The Lady Of Shalott”, he was inspired by the 1832 poem by Alfred about the the mysterious death of a beautiful woman death after looking directly at the Lancelot. He painted three different version of this poem. His series of painting about Ophelia before her death also gain its popularity but unfortunately Waterhouse did not get a chance to finish the series due to his cancer by 1915.

**Waterhouse Hylas and the Nymph 1896** – the first thing I notice about this painting this the lavender highlight on the leaf which is really neat details. He put lots of effort to all these nymphs figure and they all look like fragile porcelain doll.

Source: http://linesandcolors.com/2006/04/01/john-william-waterhouse/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_William_Waterhouse