The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is presenting the largest retrospective of works by the celebrated British artist John William Waterhouse (1849‱917) through February 7. “J. W. Waterhouse: Garden of Enchantment” 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 80 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 studies in oil, chalk and pencil. Several of these works have not been exhibited since Waterhouse’s death.
The exhibition has 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 was on view at the Groninger and the Royal Academy before its tenure here.
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 shows 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.
Although the works Waterhouse are admired by millions of people worldwide, little is generally known about the man and his artistic production. Waterhouse’s painterly manner distinguishes him from his truly pre-Raphaelite forerunners. He discovered the work of the pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais and Ophelia (1851‱852) 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.
Twentieth Century scholars who rediscovered the pre-Raphaelites often marginalized Waterhouse for these seemingly contradictory tendencies, yet this 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 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is at 1380, rue Sherbrooke Ouest. For more information, www.mbam.qc.ca or 514-285-2000.
