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JW Waterhouse's painting The Lady of Shalott, which remains Tate Britain’s best-selling postcard |
Why Waterhouse knowledge has remained a little sketchy
A new exhibition shows how the neglected Pre-Raphaelite artist
produced work worthy of much more than cult postcards and student reverence at his Primrose Hill studio, writes Gerald Isaaman
IT'S taken a long time. JW Waterhouse died in 1917 and, because of the First World War, was not honoured with the traditional retrospective at the Royal Academy to which he devoted much of his life.
And virtually since then his art has been neglected and he has floated in and out of fashion.
To call him The Modern Pre-Raphaelite, as the retrospective at the Royal Academy is titled, is itself somewhat strange given that he was born in Rome in 1849, the very year the Pre-Raphaelites announced war on modernity, as they dived into the fantasies of historical romance.
Moreover, there is hardly anything modern, certainly in relation to the early 20th-century world of Picasso and his contemporaries, in Waterhouse’s work.
Yet he has the ability to mesmerise us with nubile bare-breasted virgins and the enchanting classical stories he depicts with such skill and delectable detail on cinematic canvases.
Indeed, at Tate Britain the best-selling postcard for decades has been that of The Lady of Shalott, Waterhouse’s own depiction of Tennyson’s poem of unrequited love, which proves how much he touches today’s eternal desires.
Students galore have hung on to her Athena poster as inspiration.
And like so many of his hypnotic, romantic works – there are 43 in this excellent exhibition – it was painted at his Primrose Hill Studio, in Fitzroy Road, because he was very much a local lad, who ended his days living in a mansion in Hall Road, St John’s Wood.
That’s what makes this show particularly fascinating and sets you wondering about the long lost papers, sketchbooks, maybe diaries that Waterhouse probably left behind somewhere unsafe.
They might tell us more about his childless marriage in 1883 to the flower painter Esther Kenworthy, his occupation of first No 3 Primrose Hill Studios, then the bigger No 6, something about his mystery model Muriel Foster, from Chingford, the woman of beauty he paints again and again – and whom one American researcher says had a love affair with the painter.
They might says something too about his days as a student and teacher at the Royal Academy Schools and his days with the St John’s Wood Arts School, where his pupils included the likes of Byam Shaw.
While we may ponder about the role of women in his life and the theatrical way in which he presented them – there are a handful of sketchbooks and preliminary drawings on display in the exhibition – what overwhelms you is the mystical power of the painting Waterhouse uses to snare you into the stories he is telling.
While the stunning impact of his images confronts you, nevertheless he remains a storyteller who opens new chapters of delight, no more so than in The Lady of Shalott as she rides her boat down river to doom, and with his seductive femmes fatale in Hylas and the Nymphs. It is there too in Penelope and the Suitors and especially in The Decameron.
What is remarkable about the exhibition is that the Royal Academy didn’t initiate it as some belated tribute to one of its members.
Credit goes to the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands and to the campaigning of art historian and Waterhouse biographer Peter Trippi who has curated the exhibition.
The real bonus locally is that it brings back to life some of Camden’s inherited culture, in that Waterhouse’s Primrose Hill Studio has housed the Victorian illustrator Arthur Rackham, Lord Methuen RA and Patrick Caulfield, who died four years ago.
Caulfield’s first wife, textile artist Pauline Caulfield, is still there, having moved in 34 years ago after John Hoyland suggested it might suit the husband and wife artists.
While Waterhouse is not her favourite artist – “I don’t go for his languid nymph thing,” she says – she is sympathetic to the fact that Waterhouse has now gained some major recognition and she has been to see this retrospective exhibition.
“I’ve gradually come to know the history of the place,” she says. “People have knocked on the door over the years seeking to know about Waterhouse. And so I have become more interested in him.
“The studio is so wonderful with such a lovely atmosphere. I tend to romanticise about it and feel there is a very calm and lovely feeling about the place. I feel very lucky to be living here – and feel that I can’t bear the thought of ever living anywhere else.”
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