Waterhouse

I am in town yesterday for a breakfast meeting and visit the Royal Academy afterwards to see their newest exhibition: "J.W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite" (Waterhouse's "The Lady of Shalott," 1888, pictured).

Pre-Raphaelite is confusing because there were two different and almost opposed movements, the second of which grew out of the first. The term itself originated in relation to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an influential group of mid-nineteenth-century avante garde painters associated with Ruskin who had great effect upon British, American, and European art. Those poets who had some connection with these artists and whose work presumably shares the characteristics of their art include Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, George Meredith, William Moris and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Waterhouse himself was born in Rome to the painters William and Isabela, but when he was five the family moved to South Kensington near the newly founded Victoria and Albert Museum. He studied painting under his father before entering the Royal Academy schools in 1870. His early works were of classical themes and exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Society of British Artists and the Dudley Gallery while he is most famous for his mid- to later works often depicted women like "The Lady of Shalott," a study of Elaine of Astolat, who dies of grief when Lancelot will not love her. By the 1880s and with le D'Orsay on my mind, the influence of impressionism seen on the Pre-Raphaelite works with broader, less accurate strokes and beige or vibrant colour.