This picture, simple as it is, represents Waterhouse’s vision of a female beauty. Anthony Hobson writes: 
His models provide a theme of interest in themselves… the paintings show how as the years went by he continually sought his ideal vision of womanhood, rather than some character type adapted to each new distant ideal of Medieval Courtly love in the warmed mirrors of Italian passion and Greek sensuality.

A work such as this reveals Waterhouse’s painterly technique. The background indicates how he stated the main lines of the composition boldly with the brush, without the aid of preliminary drawing. He then built up the surface of his painting to the degree of modelling and finish revealed in the girl’s head.

Source

Unseen by the public since 1926, the rediscovery of this glowing oil study is a welcome reminder of why J.W. Waterhouse was and is so admired as a master painter. A full-scale preparatory study for the finished version of Phyllis and Demophoön that he signed in 1905 and first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1907, this canvas rewards careful viewers with many pleasures. With our eyes we appreciate its rich colouring and dynamic brushwork, while with our minds and hearts we experience a touching encounter, drawn from a classical source, that is quintessentially Waterhouse.

Examining a large, unfinished oil study like this affords us rare opportunities to admire Waterhouse’s deft draughtsmanship, particularly evident in the girl’s flesh and the boy’s face; the iconic red hair of his favourite female model; the delicate red and pink lake pigments he relished; the explosion of blossom that almost vibrates thanks to its thick impasto; the expressive zig-zagging of the tree branches; and the Italian pines, green grass, and blue sky flecked with pinkish clouds Waterhouse preferred in his final decade. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that no passage carries just one colour: Waterhouse applied touches of diverse hues everywhere, certain they would coalesce in viewers’ eyes as they backed away from the canvas.
As with his treatments of Ariadne (1898), Medea (1907), and Penelope (1912), Waterhouse consulted Ovid’s Heroides, a volume of poems recounting the ordeals that women endure through the actions (or inactions) of men. During his journey home from the Trojan War, the Greek hero Demophoön falls in love with Phyllis, daughter of the Thracian king. When he fails to keep his promise to return and marry her, Phyllis hangs herself. Fortunately, the gods take pity by transforming her into an almond tree. Demophoön finally returns and remorsefully embraces the barren tree, which suddenly sprouts the blossom seen here. Although Phyllis emerges to forgive her faithless lover, she cannot regain human form. Thanks to Waterhouse’s characteristic discretion, viewers grasp the powerful pathos of this reunion without having to witness Phyllis’s anguish or suicide. She gazes down intently, yet does not threaten, as she had done in Edward Burne-Jones’s widely noticed treatments of the story (1870 and 1882).

Phyllis and Demophoön underscores Waterhouse’s longstanding fascination with another of Ovid’s themes metamorphoses specifically the magical transformation of human beings into flowers, trees, and animals. Also evident here is Waterhouse’s close association of women with flowers, variously their beauty, inevitable decay, and function as vessels of new growth. These themes, along with the quintessentially Romantic one of unfulfilled love, were clearly on Waterhouse’s mind in the mid-1900s: at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition of 1907, he exhibited both Phyllis and Demophoön and Isabella and the Pot of Basil(both in private collections), in which Keats’s heroine buries her murdered lover’s head in a plant she waters with her tears.

Unusually for Waterhouse, a range of preparatory drawings and oil studies have survived for Phyllis and Demophoön, underscoring his determination to maximize the scene’s aesthetic and emotional impact. Particularly intriguing is his decision confirmed by this study and several pencil sketches now in the Victoria and Albert Museum—to reverse the composition. Here the tree appears on the left, with Phyllis gazing downward toward our right. In the version presented at the Academy, the composition is reversed. It is unclear why Waterhouse made this change, yet either way our attention remains riveted on the heartbreaking gaze exchanged by the lovers, a device Waterhouse had been refining since the masterpieces of the previous decade, notably Hylas and the Nymphs, 1896, (Manchester Art Gallery). In fact, this Demophoön was modelled by the same beardless youth who posed as Hylas, raising the possibility that Waterhouse worked from older drawings he had kept in his studio.

When the contents of Waterhouse’s St John’s Wood studio were dispersed by his widow at Christie’s in 1926, this was one of three full-scale oil studies for Phyllis and Demophoön offered (lots 21, 22, and 24). It is truly cause for celebration that this is the only one of the trio seen publicly since then. At some point thereafter, an owner cut away the lower half of the composition, yet the scene’s most essential components the figures’ emotionally powerful reunion in an idyllic setting have survived completely intact.

– From Christie’s catalogue.

Source

This painting is a fascinating rediscovery, epitomizing that moment in the career of J.W. Waterhouse when he had refined his distinctive mode of classical genre painting to a very high standard. The liner that separates this well-preserved canvas from its frame carries the inscriptions ‘The Courtship’ and ‘J.W. Waterhouse RA’, both of which were hand-lettered at some point long ago. There is no documentary evidence of a Waterhouse painting titled The Courtship though we know that, throughout his long career, he made many pictures for sale to private collectors which were not publicly exhibited (and thus not documented). Moreover, Waterhouse did not become a full member of the Royal Academy until 1895, by which time he had shifted to more Pre-Raphaelite subject matter. Because the present lot is undated and bears no markings or labels on its reverse, it’s place within Waterhouse’s oeuvre must instead be established by examining its subject and style.

In the summer of 1875, one of Waterhouse’s two submissions to the Royal Academy’s all-important annual exhibition was Whispered Words. Now known only through a reproductive engraving, this 40 inch-high oil celebrated romantic love, both compositionally and with a poem printed in its catalogue entry. 

This couple lived some time ago,
Perhaps two thousand years or so,
Yet I am pretty sure I know
Exactly what he said.

For it was only Wednesday week
My lips were close to Jessie’s cheek,
When she looked just like this fair Greek,
And blushed as rosy red.

This verse is apparently Waterhouse’s own, since it contains the name of his own sister, Jessie. He identifies the couple as Greek, yet the scene is more believably Pompeian, a cultural setting that fascinated Waterhouse’s generation. Moreover, the facial features of ‘Jessie’ appear not Mediterranean but ‘Graeco-West-Kensington,’ a useful phrase the painter, critic and collector W. Graham Robertson (1867-1948) coined later to describe the lounging maidens of the English painter Albert Joseph Moore, ARWS (1841-1893). Moore’s Aesthetic vision of dolce far niente (sweet idleness) was pervasive in the 1870s and early 1880s, but even more influential on Waterhouse were the archeologically informed scenes of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, OM, RA (1836-1912), the Dutch-born, London-based Royal Academician who had been re-animating Pompeian genre scenes since he first visited that ancient site in 1863. Waterhouse made his first visit to Pompeii in 1877, where he painted detailed watercolour studies of the frescoes and architecture that immediately made their way into the backgrounds of his finished paintings.

The young Waterhouse’s emulation of Alma-Tadema through such morose Royal Academy submissions as A Sick Child Brought to the Temple of Aesculapius (1877) and The Remorse of Nero after the Murder of His Mother (1878) was duly noted by critics of the time, but they devoted less commentary, if any, to the more charming scenes the young painter produced from the mid 1870s onward. Whispered Words set into motion a wave of gentle Pompeian reveries emanating from Waterhouse’s easel, including two versions of Dolce Far Niente (1879 and 1880) and The Household Gods (1880), as well as the present lot. 

Composed, drawn, painted, and coloured with ever-increasing assurance, these comfortable domestic scenes were readily comprehensible to the upper-middle-class buyers of fine art who visited such venues as the Royal Academy, Dudley Gallery (London), Institute of Oil Painters (London), Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, and Liverpool Autumn Exhibition, not to mention commercial galleries like Agnew’s. Many Victorians saw themselves as inheritors of the Roman Empire, and they were fascinated by its material remains, which were still being unearthed on a continuing basis. It was only in 1882, with the presentation of his enormous canvas Diogenes at the Royal Academy (now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney) that Waterhouse began to apply his classicizing expertise to a more grand scale.

There is a strong argument to suggest that the present lot is a painting entitled Sweet Offerings, a previously un-located painting, which was exhibited at the Liverpool Autumn Exhibition in 1882. In 1880, Waterhouse exhibited The Household Gods at the Royal Academy; also known as Offerings to the Gods, the work shows two young women adorning a domestic altar in a late Roman home. The work was bought by Sir John Aird, a prominent London collector who published it in a limited-edition catalogue of his holdings in 1884. Aird also owned Whispered Words, and the two large canvases hung side by side in his drawing room.

In 1879, however, Waterhouse had exhibited a smaller oil, Offerings, which shows a young woman daydreaming beside an altar that she has just embellished. This appeared at the less prestigious Dudley Gallery in London priced at just £25.

Unlocated and unillustrated until now, Sweet Offerings appeared at the Liverpool Autumn Exhibition in 1882, no.167, with the modest price of £35. By comparison, a year earlier, Waterhouse had sent to Liverpool the much larger A Summer’s Day in Greece priced at £120. The insertion of the word ‘sweet’ is significant; it is unlikely that a figure worshipping her ancestors at a Roman shrine would evoke the word ‘sweet’, as does the present picture, in which an amorous young man offers fresh narcissi flowers to his beloved. Waterhouse’s deft arrangement of their heads and arms intensifies the romantic mood, and the title Sweet Offerings would logically infer, without being vulgar, that the man worships his beloved.

All of Waterhouse’s characteristic features are here in unusually felicitous combinations: the juxtaposition of a swarthy man with a fair-skinned maiden; the delicate pastel hues of their clothing (especially the coral in her headband, sash, and gown); the bouquet of narcissi (a bloom Waterhouse celebrated throughout his career); the reddish-toned walls, one of which has been painted with the quintessentially Aesthetic sunflower; the potted plants; the magical number of seven birds pecking at grains on the marble floor; and the perspectival recession provided by the view beyond a heavy curtain into a sunny courtyard, by the oil lamp perched in the niche at top left, and by the staircase borrowed from so many Alma-Tadema compositions. Moreover, the outstanding quality of the flesh painting here would logically position this work later in Waterhouse’s career, in 1882 when he was 33 rather than, for example, when he was 27. Finally, the signature is absolutely right for Waterhouse in this era, and even the slight (and stable) craquelure visible on the leaves of the potted plant is characteristic of his hand.

– From Bonhams catalogue.

Source

Like so many artists who had made their names painting literary, historical and symbolist subjects, Waterhouse found himself increasingly turning to portraiture as the taste for subject pictures declined towards the end of the Victorian era. His sitters were invariably young girls or women, which is not surprising in view of the nature of his subject pictures, in which women always play a central role, as victims, temptresses, or simply vehicles for the artist’s concept of beauty. While this obviously made him happiest with female sitters, patrons no doubt saw him as ideally suited to paint their wives or daughters. Many of his sitters belonged to the Henderson family, his chief patrons during his later years.

The sitter in this present portrait is Elizabeth (Betty) Pollock (1898-1970), daughter of Sir Adrian Pollock, K.C.M.G. (1867-1943). He was Remembrancer of the City of London between 1903 and 1912, and subsequently for many years City Chamberlain and Treasurer, a post which brought him a knighthood in 1921. Betty was born in 1898, it is said in the Speaker’s House in the House of Commons, although if this was so, the circumstances are unclear. In later life she enjoyed a successful career on the stage. Her obituary in the Daily Telegraph described her as ‘one of the most subtly gifted mimics on the London stage during the 30s’. She was fêted by Noel Coward and Ivor Novello, who both devised roles especially for her in which she gave a series of brilliant ‘take-offs’ of famous people.

Waterhouse probably met the Pollocks through the actor-manager Gerald du Maurier, who was a friend of both parties. His portrait, which shows the sitter at the age of fourteen and captures a certain sense of adolescent shyness, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1912, together with his late masterpiece Penelope and her Suitors (Aberdeen Art Gallery; Hobson, pl. 77). It is not clear if the portrait’s background represents some actual scene or is a creation of the artist’s imagination, but lily-ponds were very much part of Waterhouse’s oeuvre, featuring, for example, in an Ophelia of 1894 and the famous Hylas and the Nymphs a few years later (Hobson, pls. 165 and 86). It would not have been difficult for him to transpose this familiar motif from a subject picture to a portrait, making Betty Pollock herself into a kind of Ophelia.

– From Christie’s catalogue.

Source