J.W. Waterhouse at the Royal Academy

I wouldn’t ordinarily have gone to this exhibition – I’m by habit lazy in getting myself in time to paying exhibitions, because I always feel I should have “done” the freebie exhibits first before I think about the paying ones.  Luckily, however, my lovely friend H had possession of an RA membership card, which allowed us both into the exhibit for free.  I might as well say outright that I enjoyed the exhibition very much indeed: I learnt about an artist I didn’t know well at all and found that his style greatly appealed to me.  However, the RA charge EIGHT pounds and FIFTY pence even for a student ticket; while I’d like to say that I enjoyed the exhibition enough that I would have gladly paid the admission, I’m not sure I enjoyed it quite that much.  That kind of price sounds reasonable if you get to see an entire museum, not just three or four rooms, however well-curated.

What struck both H and me was the consistency of Waterhouse’s style.  Practically any previous show I’ve been to which aims to represent different periods from a single artist’s life will show some very definite progressions and changes of style.  The only example that springs to mind is that of Rembrandt (I’m stealing whatever I can remember of this argument wholesale from a TV programme I once saw on it – could it have been Andrew Graham-Dixon?  I think it must have been, as he’s the only art critic I ever watch on telly): compare the self-portraits of his youth to the latest one of his age.  It’s recognisably the same person both as artist and sitter, of course, but there are a number of important differences, in the way he presents himself and in the more soft-focus way he paints the picture.  Waterhouse, however, was completely different: it is the lack of this progression which struck me with him.  This is not at all to say that he was an unsophisticated artist – merely that he found his style very early on and stuck to it.  This was extremely unusual, at least to my mind, but added an attraction to the show: everything felt equal.

Apart from this, however, I don’t have a great deal to say … I’m no art historian.  The best I can do is to pick out ones I liked and, if you can shoulder the RA’s fairly hefty prices, encourage you to go, as it was an enjoyable show in a terrific building that I’d never been in before.

I was particularly taken with the description of the nymphs in the above painting in the accompanying information panel – that they have the same sameyness of appearance that lilies have in nature.

Waterhouse also seemingly had quite a thing for Circe, who was very well represented in the selection of pieces at the Academy (actually, he had a thing for women generally – very few men featured prominently in this set of pictures).  H especially liked this one, “Circe Invidiosa”:

I preferred this one of her offering the cup to Ulysses:

But I think both are highly reminiscent of the work of Alphonse Mucha, in a strange way – the “Invidiosa” one of one of Mucha’s narrow season paintings, the second one of practically any of his other work (I think it’s the circular mirror behind her that really reminds me of Mucha).

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