The Last Pre-Raphaelite: John William Waterhouse – an artist who wrote strong women with a difficult fate

John William Waterhouse is often called the last Pre-Raphaelite. Beautiful long-haired virgins, mythological and medieval plots, wild herbs and overgrown ponds are related to his work with paintings by Millet and Rossetti. However, the biography of Waterhouse is very different from the biographies of romantics and brawlers of the XIX century.

He was born in the north of Italy into a family of famous artists and lived in this beautiful sunny country for the first years of his life. Waterhouse’s early work is filled with nostalgia for Italy – markets, ruins, Italian courtyards …

Subsequently, he often painted his heroines against the backdrop of Italian landscapes, dressed them in delicate antique dresses, embodied in his paintings the images of the tender Psyche and the insidious Circe – the heroines of ancient mythology. Later, Waterhouse often returned to these places in order to be saturated with their life-giving air. Continue reading →