John William Waterhouse

Sometimes called the last Pre-Raphaelite — working in the tradition of Millais, Hunt and Rossetti decades after the original Brotherhood had dissolved — Waterhouse brought the movement's combination of literary source material, sharp-focused colour and melancholy feminine beauty into the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. He was born in Rome to English painter parents, moved to London as a child, and trained at the Royal Academy Schools. His early work was influenced by Alma-Tadema's archaeological reconstructions of classical antiquity, but from the 1880s onward his imagination turned primarily to the doomed women of medieval and classical literature. The Lady of Shalott (1888) — Tennyson's version of an Arthurian tale, the Lady in her boat drifting toward Camelot and death — was his breakthrough canvas and remains one of the best-known images in Victorian art. He returned to the same subject three times across his career, each version finding a different moment in the narrative. His Circe, Ophelia, Hylas and the Nymphs, Echo and Narcissus, and the various Nereids and sirens were similarly obsessive returns to a world of supernatural female agency drawn from Keats, Ovid, Tennyson and Greek mythology. The women in these paintings are never passive; they are dangerous, enchanting, about to drown someone. Waterhouse submitted to the Royal Academy every year for nearly four decades without deviation and was elected a full Academician in 1895. His reputation, like that of all Victorian narrative painters, declined sharply after 1900 as modernism made his entire enterprise look literary and decorative. The 20th century largely ignored him; the internet found him again, and reproductions of his work now circulate in vast numbers on social media among people who have never heard of the Pre-Raphaelites.