Montreal Museum of Fine Arts to exhibit J.W. Waterhouse ~ The Modern Pre-Raphaelite |
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| Written by Alfred Owings |
| Friday, 25 December 2009 05:08 |
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 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. Visit The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts at : http://www.mmfa.qc.ca/en/ Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~ |
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