MONTREAL.- The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts will
host the largest-ever retrospective of works by the celebrated British artist
John William Waterhouse (1849-1917). J. W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite
is the first large-scale monographic exhibition on Waterhouse’s
work since 1978 and the first to feature his entire artistic career.
This retrospective features some eighty paintings that are among the finest and
most spectacular of the artist’s production, on loan from public and private
collections in Australia, England, Ireland, Taiwan, the United States and
Canada. It will also present many of the artist’s attractive studies in oil,
chalk and pencil. Several of these works have not been exhibited since
Waterhouse’s lifetime. The exhibitionhas been organized by the Groninger Museum,
the Netherlands, with the collaboration of the Royal Academy of Arts, London,
and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition, which premiered at
the Groninger Museum, will also be presented at the Royal Academy of Arts (June
27 to September 13, 2009), and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (October 1,
2009, to February 7, 2010).

Often associated with the
Pre-Raphaelites, who aimed to recapture the beauty and simplicity of the
medieval world, Waterhouse was also a classical painter. The exhibition will
show how Waterhouse’s paintings reflect his engagement with contemporary themes
like medievalism, classical heritage, spiritualism and the femme fatale. Born
the year the Pre-Raphaelites first exhibited at the Royal Academy, he inherited
their taste for Alfred Tennyson, John Keats and William Shakespeare and was
fascinated by beauty, the underworld and myths of enchantresses. His paintings
reveal a romantic fascination for female passions: among his subjects are the
Lady of Shalott, Ophelia, Ariadne, Cleopatra, Circe, La Belle Dame Sans Merci,
Lamia, the Sirens tormenting Ulysses, and Mariamne condemned to death. Inspired
by literature and Greek mythology, he also drew from classical myth as
interpreted by Homer and Ovid.
Although the works of J. W. Waterhouse
are admired by millions of people worldwide, the general public actually knows
relatively little about the man himself and his artistic production.
Waterhouse’s painterly manner distinguishes him from his truly Pre-Raphaelite
forerunners. Waterhouse discovered the work of the Pre-Raphaelite John Everett
Millais and Ophelia (1851-1852) in particular in 1886. It was also during this
same period that he was influenced by the spontaneity of newer French art
through the work of English artists like William Logsdail, Frank Bramley and the
Newlyn and Primrose Hill schools. The twentieth-century scholars who
rediscovered the Pre-Raphaelites often marginalized Waterhouse for such
seemingly contradictory tendencies, yet it is these which have endeared him to
viewers today. The exhibition will place his most renowned works in the context
of his whole career to illustrate why Waterhouse can be regarded as one of the
most important artists of classical and romantic tradition.
The artist
was born in Rome to British parents, but the family returned to London five
years later. Even at a very young age, Waterhouse assisted in the studio of his
father, where he developed his interest in painting, sculpture and classical
antiquity. He was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools in 1870, and gradually
began to make a name for himself with strikingly original and melancholy
pictures inspired by ancient Greece and Rome. His richly coloured, emotionally
charged images of beautiful women brought him renown throughout the British
Empire and at the World Exhibitions of the 1890s and 1900s.
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