Interview

JohnWilliamWaterhouse,Beyond theModernPre-Raphaelite

c u r at o r e l i z a b e t h p r e t t e j o h n , p r o f e s s o r o f h i s t o ry o f a rt,

u n i v e r s i t y o f b r i s t o l , ta l k s t o d a r r e ly n g u n z b u r g

Elizabeth Prettejohn was one of threecurators who worked on the exhi-bition entitled ‘J W Waterhouse

(1849–1917), The Modern Pre-Raphaelite’presented in three different countries.Darrelyn Gunzburg spoke with ElizabethPrettejohn in October 2009 about the

difficulties and joys of bringing such anexhibition into reality.

DG: The exhibition was a long time in theplanning. How did the idea form and what werethe difficulties in pulling the exhibition together?

Elizabeth Prettejohn: Peter Trippi hadbeen working on a general life and worksstudy of Waterhouse for Phaidon Press,which came out in 2002, and he realisedthere had never been a comprehensiveretrospective on Waterhouse. At the samemoment, Tate Britain curator RobertUpstone was focusing on the extraordin-ary public appeal of The Lady of Shalott athis own institution. That painting is Tate’sbest-selling postcard and has been foryears. Robert rang Peter to explore the ideaof a Waterhouse exhibition, and since I’dknown Peter for some time and beeninvolved as a reader for the book, Peter andRobert drew me in to their discussion. Wehad a proposal by 2002 and the exhibitionopened in December 2008. We didn’t havean easy time to begin with, persuadingmuseums and galleries to take the show,and we were disappointed that no galleryin the USA came forward. However, I thinkthat the appreciation of Victorian artgenerally in the USA is behind that incontinental Europe and Canada.

We devised the idea for the exhibition, thebasic picture list, the research, and thecatalogue work. Then in collaborationwith us, the curators in the various muse-ums took charge of recreating the show intheir own spaces: Patty Wageman at theGroninger Museum, Netherlands, Mary-Anne Stevens at the Royal Academy,London, and Nathalie Bondil, the director,and Anne Grace, the curator of modernart, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts,Canada. I am extremely grateful to allthree venues for not making budget anissue. There are a number of strikingpaintings from Australia and we borrowedall of them.

DG: How did each venue change the exhibition?

EP: The Groninger Museum in the northof Holland is a dramatic building from the1990s designed by Alessandro Mendini,Philippe Starck, and other glamorouscontemporary architects. The gallery spaceshave vibrantly coloured walls and floors,and one is a big oval area, which meant thatshowing wasn’t strictly chronological.

The Royal Academy was a more histori-cally aware show, strictly chronological inorientation, so it allowed you to trace thedevelopment of the artist’s career inconsiderable detail. The wall colours werehistorical, the deep bricky reds that gavethe feel of the Academy environmentwhere the paintings were shown whenthey were first made. The exhibition tookplace at the same time as the summerexhibition of contemporary art, so therewas also that continuity from the periodof Waterhouse to contemporary artistsstill showing their new work there.

The Montreal Museum of Fine Artspresented our exhibition in its 1990spavilion designed by the architect MosheSafdie. The exhibition area was amodern environment with big spacesand two theatre designers created it all inblack: black walls, black curtains, andblack flowers on some of the panels. Theeffect was spectacular as it allowedthe colours and the gold frames to

ElizabethPrettejohn

Waterhouse exhibition installed at theGroningerMuseum.PhotoMarten deLeeuw.

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glow and Waterhouse’s colour sensebecame acutely obvious, from the subduedcolouring of the earlier pictures to thedecorative, brilliantly coloured work atthe end.

DG: So the different approaches from allthree countries not only offered three differentperspectives but three immensely different waysin to the material. Even so, Waterhouse hasbeen largely ignored in academic art historyand museum practice. Why do you think thatis so?

EP: [Pauses] Good question! [Laughs] Onereason is because he isn’t easy to fit intoany of the usual art historical groupings.We chose the subtitle ‘The ModernPre-Raphaelite’ for the Royal Academyshowing. Some people objected to the asso-ciation with the Pre-Raphaelites, others tothe claim that he was modern, so youcouldn’t win on either side. However, hewasn’t just a ‘left over Pre-Raphaelite’but an artist who was aware of thePre-Raphaelite tradition in Britain andwas, at the same time, working in a waythat was really up to date. Waterhouse’swork was actually more important ingenerating new developments in Britishart and beyond in the period of the 1890sand 1900s than scholars have realised.

Many reviews in London questioned howWaterhouse could be painting in this styleat the time when Malevich was doing hisBlack Square, so he was seen as being out ofstep with his times. Critical response onthe continent, however, tended to relate itto northern European, Dutch, Belgian andGerman Symbolism, and Waterhousemakes a lot of sense in that context.Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus, forexample, is a striking picture of the headof Orpheus and his lyre floating down theriver and the head is still singing. It’s ahaunting subject and it chimes well withother treatments of Orpheus by painterssuch as Odilon Redon and GustaveMoreau, taking it out of the narrowcontext of late Pre-Raphaelitism.

There is also not much primary documen-tation on Waterhouse. He was not a letterwriter. He didn’t keep diaries. However,scholarly neglect means that people ha-ven’t researched what material is there,and Peter did find a tiny cache of fiveletters that Waterhouse or his wife hadwritten to a New York patron, which have

ended up at the Beinecke Library at YaleUniversity. They revealed how Waterhouseinterpreted his pictures of the early 1890s.We hope interest stimulated by theexhibition will encourage people to con-tinue that kind of work.

Certainly, in my Art History Batchelor’sdegree at Harvard (1978–82), the name ofWaterhouse was completely absent. Evenin my postgraduate work at the CourtauldInstitute, where you might have expectedBritish things to be prominent, I didn’treally hear of Waterhouse. He doesn’tcome into university courses at all.

Having said that, today’s university stu-dents are most interested in Waterhouse.Waterhouse is a brilliant dramatist of

subjects and narratives. He’ll find acomposition for a complex narrativesubject that gives this powerful interpreta-tion at a glance, even if it’s an unfamiliarstory. For example Mariamne is a compli-cated picture with a complex story thatcomes from the Jewish historian Josephusand involves obscure characters fromfirst century BCE Jewish history engagedin intrigues and betrayals. Waterhousefound a strong pictorial narrative for itand, at a Waterhouse Study Day in Londonin September 2009, Simon Goldhill,Professor of Greek at King’s College,Cambridge, gave a scholarly interpretationof the painting. I showed that picture

JWWaterhouse,MariamnePhoto Royal Academyof Arts,London.

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Interview

to the first-year students at the Universityof Bristol who hadn’t heard that talkand they picked up the same nuancesof ‘glances not quite meeting’. The factthat Waterhouse instantly makes senseis his virtue as a painter, and a pictorialcomposer.

I have become convinced that seriousscholarly work on Waterhouse is worthdoing. A major area for exploration is hiscontacts outside Britain. This is really aproblem with all Victorian painting. It’sartificially separated from what’s going onin the rest of the world. This makes nosense. The pictures tell us that Waterhousewas familiar with developments abroad,such as French academic classicism, andwe need to recover that context. In the1880s, for example, he worked a great dealwith experimental approaches to plein-airpainting and with a square brush techni-que associated with French artists such asJules Bastien-Lepage and in that periodhe’s much closer to the French-orientedpainters of the New English Art Club thanhe is to the Royal Academicians.

Waterhouse tends to be regarded as beingto do with popular culture, because somany people like his work. That actuallywasn’t true in his lifetime. He was defini-tely high culture and critics said he was apainter who appealed more to otherpainters than to the tastes of the masses.So he’s completely flipped his press imagefrom that period and that’s interesting.

DG: I saw the exhibition in London and I, forone, am grateful that you maintained theperseverance of your vision to bring the workstogether. Thank you – and for your time today.

darrelyn gunzburg

University of Bristol

JWWaterhouse,StCecilia.Photo Royal Academy of Arts,London.

Royal Academy exhibitionwithTheLadyof Shallot.Photo Royal Academy of Arts,London.

EDITOR’S NOTE

The fully illustrated catalogue to the exhibition discussed in this interview, J W Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite by ElizabethPrettejohn, Peter Trippi, Robert Upstone, and Patty Wageman, is published by BAi Publishers, Brussels, 2008.

The only other book available on Waterhouse is J W Waterhouse by Peter Trippi (Phaidon Press, London, 2002). A series of short,online films on individual paintings by Waterhouse, narrated by Peter Trippi, is available on the Royal Academy website:

www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/waterhouse/video-curator-peter-trippi-looks-at-key-works-in-the-exhibition/

Elizabeth Prettejohn has written a number of books, including:

Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007)

Beauty and Art 1750-2000 (Oxford University Press, 2005)

The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (Tate Publishing, London, 2000 with new paperback edition 2007).

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Interview