via www.johnwaterhouse.com
The only online reproduction that comes close to conveying the intensity of the original’s colouring. That peacock blue! The bubbles sent skittering over the surface of the pool by the column of poured liquid are reproduced in the pattern of Circe’s pleated robe - or does it represent the scales of the water dragon on which she stands? In Waterhouse’s portrayals of Lamia, she has the legs (and gauzy pink dress) of a young girl but artfully trails a shawl that looks like the discarded skin of a boa constrictor. If dude hadn’t made it as a salon painter he could’ve had quite the career as a fabric designer.
The exhibition currently showing at the Montreal Fine Arts Museum is only a water nymph or three short of comprehensive and completely worth the visit, though the design - the art direction of the exhibition itself - is kind of lulz. Firstly, everything is painted black and thematically arranged, so you have the black Roman peristyle, the black underwater cave, the black Victorian boudoir (black chair and easel), the black enchanted garden (black clambering silk roses!). Secondly, all the text is done in this font called “Raphael”, which I can only assume is a private joke on the part of the designer; you know it better as the font used on the cover of Britney Spears’ self-titled third album. The overall effect was maybe not so much Waterhouse as xxxHolic-era CLAMP. I felt like I should’ve left and come back in a Black Chii style gothloli outfit. To pile goth on goth, the curatorial wall text seemed convinced that Waterhouse (who left very few papers) was a student of occultism. This had never occurred to me, and I’m a student of occultism ahahaha, but believe it or not when one views the paintings side by side the thought becomes plausible. At least, there was some heavy-duty visual symbolism being carried obsessively from one work over to the next, that only related marginally to the purported subject matter of any given canvas. Britannia could have been Penelope could have been Circe could have been the Lady of Shalott, but who she really represented is anyone’s guess.
Also check out: Melissa Auf De Maur’s Waterhouse-inspired film OOOM (I wouldn’t have ID’d the connection if it hadn’t been made explicit by its inclusion in the exhibition, but there’s an aesthetic debt for certain). And Waterhouse’s very own copy of Tennyson - it turns out he was a doodler.
