Translated in English as ‘The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy,’ this painting depicts a woman ensnaring a knight in the forest, drawing him towards her with her hair. The knight, totally enraptured by her beauty stares into her eyes hopelessly. As Peter Trippi, world expert on Waterhouse, points out in his catalog resume: “This picture owes its intensity not only to the seductive gaze from the lady’s eye, but also the figures’ expressive juxtaposition.” Trippi also says that La Belle Dame Sans Merci is a result of the “fascination with the hypnotic power of beauty.” The title of this piece derives from a poem by Keats first published in 1820, in which a knight is bewitched by a fairy in a meadow, almost costing him his life. (Resume on J.W. Waterhouse) La Belle Dam Sans Merci is a common theme depicted in many Victorian paintings of a woman using her beauty to entrap men, putting them at great peril.

– Kara Ross

Letters From John William Waterhouse to George Woodiwiss concerning the sale of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”.

Source

The Victorians revered William Shakespeare: at least 800 editions of his collected works, many illustrated, were published in Britain during the 19th Century. The painter John William Waterhouse surely grew up reading Shakespeare’s writings in their original form, and also popular analyses by such commentators as Anna Jameson. In her bestselling volume, Characteristics of Women (1832), Jameson positioned Shakespeare’s female characters as role models or cautionary emblems, allowing these fictional personalities to become compellingly vivid in her readers’ sympathetic imaginations.
In 1875, for his second appearance in the Royal Academy’s all-crucial Summer Exhibition, 25-year old Waterhouse submitted Miranda, a scene from The Tempest in which the maiden watches the doomed ship on the distant horizon. Twelve years later, Waterhouse numbered among the 21 prominent artists commissioned by the popular illustrated weekly The Graphic to participate in ‘The Graphic Gallery of Shakespeare’s Heroines’. His scene of Cleopatra sulking on a leopard-skin-covered divan was reproduced in the magazine and then in portfolio editions of varying quality. Waterhouse went on to paint three scenes of Ophelia (1889, 1894, and 1910) — each distinct in composition, yet captivating in emotional power. Given the enormous affection with which his contemporaries regarded Juliet— indeed, Jameson wrote, ‘All Shakespeare’s women, being essentially women, either love or have loved, or are capable of loving; but Juliet is love itself’ — it is surprising that Waterhouse depicted her only once.

He exhibited the present painting at London’s progressive New Gallery in 1898, the same summer he showed two larger and more compositionally challenging canvases (Flora and the Zephyrs and Ariadne) at the Royal Academy. This was common practice for Waterhouse: a year earlier he had sent the single-figure Mariana in the South to the New Gallery, while the Academy displayed the multi-figure Hylas and the Nymphs. Like his peers, he often did this because the more spectacular scenes would attract higher prices and keener reviews at the Academy, but the prestigious New Gallery was a reliable venue to sell more modestly-scaled pictures to clients with marginally smaller budgets. This is not to suggest that the single-figure pictures are uninteresting; in fact, the appearance of Juliet after so many years out of sight offers fresh opportunities to appreciate its beautiful colour harmonies and psychological incisiveness.

Here we see a lovely girl wearing a richly-coloured gown that closely resembles Mariana’s in its cut. Endowed with unusually curly hair (for Waterhouse), Juliet grasps her luxurious blue necklace nervously. She is presented in the full profile perfected by Italian Renaissance artists; for most of the 15th Century, privileged maidens ready to be married off (or recently wed) were depicted in just this pose, aloof from the viewer’s gaze. From around 1480, however, female sitters began to look out toward us. Waterhouse does not go quite that far, yet Juliet does give us a sidelong glance, as if she suspects that Romeo, or possibly the citizens of Verona (all invisible here), are watching her closely. Waterhouse had successfully depicted this intriguing effect in his 1894 painting, Field Flowers, and would do so again in the early 1900s with Windflowers, Boreas, and Veronica.

This subtle glance is insightful because Juliet is—literally—trapped in an impossible situation, unable to address it head on. Waterhouse underscores the girl’s predicament by positioning her within an unyielding grid of hard architectural forms: the massive brick footbridge and wall behind her, the grey parapet below her, and even the band-like blue river that separates her from the townscape beyond. The illusion of Juliet walking slowly along the river is enhanced by Waterhouse’s decision to cut off the masonry arch visible at top left, as well as the near end of the footbridge (bottom right). Had he painted these forms in their entirety, the scene would become more symmetrical and more static; here, instead, we can imagine Juliet gliding slowly toward the left, glancing warily in our direction.

An early owner of Juliet (possibly the first) was the barrister Sir Frederick M. Fry, who also owned Waterhouse’s 1908 version of Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May and his 1909 version of Lamia. At the artist’s 1926 estate sale at Christie’s, Fry also purchased two additional works (A Courtyard, Venice and The Easy Chair). A leader and historian of London’s Merchant Taylors Company, Fry was close enough to Waterhouse that he attended the artist’s funeral in 1917.

– From Christie’s catalogue.

Source

The present sketch is dedicated to the Scottish artist Robert Payton Reid (1859-1945), who studied in Paris and Munich and may have met John William Waterhouse on one of his journeys to the Continent. Of this dynamic and painterly study, Peter Trippi writes, “suggestive of Italian origin, the crooked nose and curly red hair of the model […] reflect the current vogue for the actress Sarah Bernhardt’s exotic beauty”

– From Sotheby’s catalogue.

Source

This highly-impressionistic sketch is a study of the female model in Waterhouse’s painting of 1893 entitled A Naiad (private collection). It anticipates his masterpiece of three years later Hylas and the Nymphs (1896, Manchester City Gallery), which depicts Hylas, a companion of Hercules, who becomes bewitched by a group of mesmerisingly beautiful water-nymphs who lure him into a pool to his death. In A Naiad, however, the nymph appears to be far more innocent and investigative as she climbs out of a woodland stream, with water-lily leaves woven into her hair, entranced by the sleeping figure of a young man. The Greek poet Hesiod wrote of naiads initiating youths sexually; in the finished version, a union of spirit and mortal appears imminent because goats-symbols the god of sensual abandon, Dionysus-observe the approach, and because the boy wears Dionysus’s feline skin.

In ancient pastoral and Romantic poetry, a naiad was a nymph who lived in the water. Naiads were associated with Pan, the raucous, goat-legged god of woods and ruler of primeval Arcadia; as suggested by his name (‘all’), Pan permeated a blissful world shared by humans, animals, plants and supernatural beings. Through the nineteenth century, a rising tide of Pan-related art and literature signalled the Romantic resistance to the austerity of modern Christianity, science and alienation from simple pleasures of the land.

– From Christie’s catalogue.

Source

In 1892, J.W. Waterhouse signed and dated a small oil sketch of a mermaid combing her hair (now in a New York private collection). Its date confirms that this motif fascinated him for at least eight years, as it was only in 1900 that he finally completed the large A Mermaid as his Diploma Work for the Royal Academy’s permanent collection. Perfectionistic and chronically tardy, Waterhouse must have agonized over A Mermaid because he knew that it would represent him forever. Surely he would be pleased that today it is recognized internationally, primarily because it features an iconic example of what has come to be known as ‘the Waterhouse girl’ – a pale-skinned, rosy-cheeked redhead combing her hair and gazing dreamily into the distance.

The present sketch almost certainly dates from the period 1892-95, and is an important rediscovery. Firstly, it is much larger than the three other Mermaid sketches known to survive; indeed, it is almost as large as the final version, and thus was probably made later in the preparatory process. Secondly, it is closer to the final picture in terms of both colouring and setting, as here the artist ‘stepped back’ to present not only a highly finished figure, but also a lively expanse of seawater. For the backdrop, he opted not to use the massive grey rocks of the final version, but glowing pinkish cliffs related to those in his Ulysses and the Sirens (1891) and Ariadne (1898).

The present picture offers rare evidence of how Waterhouse built up his surfaces with loose strokes, concentrating most on the face and hair, and delighting in the jewel-like blues, greens, and mauves of the waves. He probably drew inspiration from Tennyson’s The Mermaid (1830), which asks:

“Who would be
A mermaid fair,
Singing alone,
Combing her hair…”

Through poetry like Tennyson’s and stories such as Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid (1855), the Victorians fantasized that water-women sought to experience human love and secure a soul by luring sailors. This notion was further reinforced by the best-known water-woman in search of love, Ophelia, whom Shakespeare compared to a mermaid as she drowned. Ignoring her flushed cheeks, the Daily Telegraph saw in Waterhouse’s final rendition of A Mermaid a ‘cold, impersonal beauty, happily distinguished from the warmth of humanity’, while the Art Journal noted her ‘wistful-sad look’ and observed that ‘never can this beautiful creature, troubled with emotion, experience … the joys of womanhood’.

This subject relates to other important scenes Waterhouse developed in the 1890s, including La Belle Dame Sans Merci (Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt), Ophelia (private collection), and Hylas and the Nymphs (Manchester Art Gallery). In all of these, an unearthly young woman holds her hair in full or three-quarter profile. More complex are the Symbolist interconnections Waterhouse perceived among these nature-women: whether their stories derive from Keats, Shakespeare, Ovid, or folk traditions, the girls are both enchanted and enchanting, due in large measure to the erotic possibilities of their untrammelled hair and the songs they sing. Across Europe in the 1890s, the interconnections of sex, death, water, and music were explored by artists partly in response to growing male anxiety about women’s demands for equality; among the explorers of this terrain were Waterhouse, Burne-Jones, Klimt, Stuck, and Böcklin. Still another influence was the growing prestige of sixteenth-century Venice; in 1895 Waterhouse surely saw the large exhibition of Venetian art presented at the New Gallery in London, and indeed this composition somewhat resembles Titian’s celebrated Venus Anadyomene (1520-25).

It is possible that H.W. Henderson, who owned the painting in the first half of the twentieth-century, is Henry William Henderson (1862-1931), the brother of Sir Alexander Henderson, 1st Bt., and 1st Baron Faringdon (1850-1934), of Buscot Park, Oxfordshire. The Henderson family were Waterhouse’s greatest patrons. Lord Faringdon owned Burne-Jones’s celebrated ‘Briar Rose’ series and also A Girl watching a Tortoise by Thomas Armstrong.

– From Christie’s catalogue.

Source