This drawing was very likely made by John William Waterhouse between 1873 and 1877, before he visited Pompeii for the first time. It features a model and props resembling those seen in his other works of this period; the most important examples are In the Peristyle, 1874 (Touchstones, Rochdale) and Whispered Words, 1875 (location unknown). The ancient wall decoration at far right echoes the one seen in After the Dance, 1876 (Private Collection). 
Waterhouse definitely participated in various “black-and-white” exhibitions at the Dudley Gallery, London, and this may well be one of them, though we cannot find a match by title. There is no evidence that this drawing is a preparatory study for a larger oil painting.

– From Christie’s catalogue.

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St. Eulalia, a girl of twelve and a native of Merida in Spain, was martyred there in or about the year 304 for defying the local magistrate’s attempt to enforce Diocletian’s edict that all subjects of Rome must make sacrifices to the Roman gods. The form her martyrdom reputedly took was particularly gruesome: first two executioners began to tear her body with iron hooks, then lighted torches were applied to her breasts and sides until finally, as the fire caught her hair, she was stifled to death.
Waterhouse exhibited his painting with the following note: ‘Prudentius says that the body of St. Eulalia was shrouded “by a miraculous fall of snow when lying in the forum after her martyrdom”’. In both the sketch and the painting Waterhouse treated the subject with a certain amount of artistic licence: ‘the forum’ (presumably in Spain) now appears to be the Forum in Rome, the 12-year old girl is depicted (though in no way salaciously) as a fully-developed young woman, and though there is snow in the air and on the ground, it cannot be said to ‘shroud’ her half-naked and apparently quite unmutilated body.

The study, perhaps Waterhouse’s first conception of the subject, shows the foreshortened body of the saint (in a pose faithfully followed in the painting) lying supine at the foot of the massive plinth of one of a pair of equestrian statues which presumably symbolize imperial might. Behind it stands a Roman soldier, his back towards us, gesturing towards a distant and dimly-seen group of spectators as if demonstrating the penalties of disobedience. Snow falls, in thick flakes of Chinese white; and there are no intermediaries between the body of the Christian martyr and the symbols of temporal power. In the finished painting, Waterhouse borrowed another detail from the legend according to Prudentius, who said that as the girl expired, a white dove seemed to come out of her mouth and wing its way heavenwards. Waterhouse introduced sixteen doves into his painting, to good effect, for they enhance the air of a miracle; and he replaced the statues of the sketch by a soaring wooden cross on the right of his composition, implying that the martyrdom was by crucifixion (the painting, though exhibited merely as ‘St. Eulalia’, was indeed reproduced in both the Art Journal and the Magazine of Art for 1893 as ‘St. Eulalia’s Crucifixion’). The position of the soldier has changed, and his attitude has somehow softened: though he still stands sentinel, he allows a group of evidently compassionate spectators to come within a short distance of the martyred figure, and the kneeling figure of a young girl among them seems to suggest that the martyrdom was not in vain. 

Anthony Hobson, Department of the History of Art, Lanchester Polytechnic, who is working on Waterhouse, notes that an oil sketch for ‘St. Eulalia’ was formerly at Rugby School, part of a collection dispersed in 1950 (present whereabouts unknown). 

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The present drawing is a study for the figure of Echo, at the same scale as she is in the oil painting. Waterhouse rarely made full-scale studies for his paintings in this way, more often using small sketchbooks to formulate ideas and poses, before working directly onto the canvas. As such the importance of the painting is evident in the production of the study. Using the same technique employed by Burne-Jones, he has drawn his model nude, in order to understand the movement and tensions of her body in the pose, before adding the drapery later. The hands and feet are left unrealised, waiting for their setting in order to take shape. The strong, sweeping lines have a sinuous fluidity which captures the elegance and poise of the heartbroken nymph.

Whilst the myth of Narcissus is hugely well-known and has been frequently represented by artists throughout the ages, the related story of Echo is a more unusual subject. The myth of Narcissus has been told for at least two thousand years, whilst Echo first appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which she is the catalyst for Narcissus’s fate. Seeing him walking in the woods one day, she fell in love and tried to embrace him. Narcissus pushed her away, leaving her heartbroken, and she faded away until nothing but an echoing sound remained. Nemesis, the goddess of revenge, learnt of this and decided to punish Narcissus, luring him to a pool where he saw his own reflection and, not realising it was only an image, fell in love with it. Eventually realising the futility of this, he committed suicide.

Waterhouse, although twenty years younger than the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, became increasingly influenced by their work throughout his career, both stylistically and in terms of subject matter, and made his first notable foray into Pre-Raphaelitism with his 1888 The Lady of Shalott (Tate Britain). It is this later style, rather than his early classicism, for which he is best remembered. The Times in his obituary (12 February 1917) described his work as ‘pre-Raphaelite pictures in a more modern manner’, and he was seen to take up the mantle of Edward Burne-Jones in his retelling of ancient stories. Perhaps best-known for his Tennysonian scenes, episodes from the Metamorphoses in fact account for a greater number of his works. Echo and Narcissuswas Waterhouse’s major work in the 1903 Academy Exhibition, and was critically well-received: The Studiocommented that ‘Mr Waterhouse, indeed, has not often before touched so high a level, admirable artist as he always is’. Waterhouse brilliantly captures the intricacies of the story within a single moment – Echo and Narcissus separated by the pool, him reaching futilely towards his reflection which he cannot touch, whilst she gazes longingly across at him, unable to reach him. 

– From Christie’s catalogue.

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The chalk drawing Flora is a beautiful and rare survival from the lengthy evolution of one of J.W. Waterhouse’s largest and most complex paintings. In the very prime of his career, he premiered Flora and the Zephyrs at the Royal Academy’s 1898 Summer Exhibition, by which time it had already been acquired by the celebrated collector George McCulloch.

In contrast to his contemporary Frederic Leighton, P.R.A., who left behind more than 2,000 working drawings, fewer than 150 of Waterhouse’s preparatory drawings are known, most depicting a model’s head drawn in chalk or charcoal. Close study of Waterhouse’s oil paintings reveals that he regularly made compositional changes at the easel, but because his female protagonists were so crucial to the emotional immediacy of his scenes, he created more preparatory drawings of them than of any other motif. 

Flora and the Zephyrs was inspired by Sandro Botticelli’s renowned Allegory of Spring (Primavera), which Waterhouse had surely admired during visits to Florence. For their subject Botticelli and Waterhouse both turned to Ovid, who chronicled the abduction of the nymph Chloris by Zephyrus, the benevolent west wind, and his followers. She was transformed into Flora, Roman goddess of flowers, fruit, and spring. Botticelli shows, to the right of Flora casting her petals, her former self abducted by Zephyrus. Waterhouse’s composition offers various echoes, most obviously through Flora’s upward gaze and the figures’ proximity to the viewer. Both painters present a tapestry-like landscape of flower-strewn grass, though Waterhouse added the meandering stream often found in Renaissance art. Gathering flowers by a fountain, Waterhouse’s heroine and her attendants are terrified by the beating of wings. These maidens seem almost to be sisters, so similar are they in appearance, and the zephyrs are even more identical.

Flora is a beautiful object of desire, and thus the composition centres on the gaze she exchanges with Zephyrus, who kisses her arm passionately. Her expression signals her newfound sexual awareness as Zephyrus wraps her with a garland of white roses. The present drawing must date from late in the painting’s development, as Flora’s gaze and pose align closely with the final oil version. Another earlier charcoal study (Private Collection) shows Flora seemingly preparing to shout in fear as she looks directly at the viewer. And in a subsequent oil sketch (Private Collection), Flora regards Zephyrus obliquely. Here, however, she looks up directly at him, with her arms arranged to convey both instinctive self-defence and openness to Zephyrus’s approach, emphasising her ample bust.

In 1898 TheTimes saw Flora and her attendants as distinctly English in appearance, and the Spectator argued that their natural beauty evoked ‘the spirit of the early Renaissance more truly than to construct a sham primitiveness … Woebegone people we too often see in ideal pictures.’ This critic perceived correctly how Waterhouse’s lively brushwork and flushed cheeks differed significantly from the pallid linearity of Burne-Jones’s disciples, who also revered Botticelli.

To describe Waterhouse’s adolescent figures, the late twentieth-century biographer, Anthony Hobson, coined the phrase jeune fille fatale, probably inspired by the critic M.H. Spielmann’s praise in 1898 of ‘a sweet girl-fatalist’. Spielmann was referring to Flora and and also to Ariadne, which Waterhouse premiered in the same year. Illustrated here is a photograph of Waterhouse putting the finishing touches on both paintings in his Primrose Hill studio. 

This drawing of Flora is an iconic example of Waterhouse’s jeune fille fatale, a reminder of how deftly he combined sensuality with innocence in a way that delights viewers as much today as it did in his heyday. 

– From Christie’s catalogue.

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This is a sketch for the greatest of Waterhouse’s late canvases, the last painting in a series of pictures inspired by Alfred Tennyson’s poem ‘The Lady of Shallot’. The first of the series (Tate) was painted in 1888 and depicts the tragic protagonist embarking on her last voyage, consumed by the curse that had befallen her. This picture was to become Waterhouse’s most famous painting and remains one of the most popular pictures on public display in Britain. In 1894 Waterhouse painted another Lady of Shallot, this time entwined with the threads of her tapestry (Leeds City Art Gallery) but it would be almost twenty years before he returned to the poem to paint ‘I am Half Sick of Shadows’, Said the Lady of Shallot (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto). The 1915 painting depicts the earliest episode from the poem that Waterhouse would paint and shows the imprisoned maiden dreaming of unfulfilled love and her frustration at only being able to view the outside world through the reflections in her mirror.

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The head study appears to relate to the woman seated third from the left in John William Waterhouse’s A Tale from the Decameron, one of Waterhouse’s last paintings, it is based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s literary masterpiece, The Decameron, written between 1348-1353.

– From Sotheby’s catalogue.

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