The Art of Reception: J.W. Waterhouse and the Painting of Desire in Victorian Britain

Abstract

Victorian art, particularly in the latter decades of the 19th century, turned to classical subjects obsessively. Alma-Tadema, Poynter, Leighton, Watts, and a host of less celebrated figures, produced a string of canvasses especially for the Royal Academy but also for other galleries in London and for exhibition around the country, which drew on the passion for the classical world so much in evidence in the broader cultural milieu of nineteenth-century Europe. Classics was an integral part of the furniture of the Victorian mind, through the education system, through popular culture, through architecture, through opera, through literature. The high art of the Royal Academy, viewed by thousands and extensively discussed in the press, is a fundamental aspect of this classicising discourse. This era was self-consciously a great age of progress, but it is striking to what degree the rapidly changing culture of Britain expressed its concerns, projected its ideals and explored its sense of self through images of the past—medieval, and early Christian, as much as classical. In this article, I want to look at one artist, J.W. Waterhouse, who was at the centre of this artistic moment—a discussion which will also involve us in investigating the Victorian perception of less familiar classical authors such as Josephus and Prudentius (as well as Homer and Ovid), and less familiar classical figures—St Eulalia, Mariamne—as well as the most recognisable classical icons such as the Sirens and Circe. My first aim is to show how sophisticated and interesting the art of Waterhouse is, a figure who has suffered markedly from the shifts of taste in the twentieth century. His classical pictures in particular show a fascinating engagement with the position of the male subject of desire, which has been largely ignored in the scant discussions of his work, and is strikingly absent from the most influential attempts to see Waterhouse's art in its Victorian context. Waterhouse's visualisation of classical subjects goes to the heart of Victorian anxieties about sexuality.