Collection: Art prints by John William Waterhouse

John William Waterhouse was a British painter and is considered one of the most important representatives of late Pre-Raphaelitism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was born in Rome in 1849, where his parents lived and worked as painters, and grew up in an environment steeped in art, classical antiquity and Mediterranean light. This early influence was to determine his entire later work. He received his formal training at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, where he acquired the fundamentals of the craft and gained early recognition as an exceptionally technically gifted painter.

Waterhouse developed an early fascination with the world of ancient mythology, medieval legend and literary tradition. It was not contemporary reality that interested him, but the great tales of Greek and Roman antiquity, the Arthurian legends, the poetry of Tennyson and Keatt and the world of the Old Testament. Almost without exception, his work focused on female figures - nymphs, sorceresses, sirens, tragic heroines and mythical seductresses - whom he endowed with a psychological presence and painterly sensuality that fundamentally distinguishes his pictures from mere academic illustration. Circe, Ophelia, the mermaids, the ladies from Tennyson's poems - all these figures recur again and again in his work, treated with an affection and intensity that reveals that they were far more than mere pictorial pretexts for him.

From the 1880s onwards, Waterhouse established himself as one of the most successful and highly regarded painters of his generation at the Royal Academy. A central feature of his work is the combination of classical compositional discipline and a rich, sensual colorfulness that combines the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites with an independent, warmer and more accessible pictorial language. His depictions of water in particular - still ponds, shimmering lakes, dark rivers - are among the most compelling in his art: Waterhouse never treats water as a mere background, but as an element of symbolic depth, combining beauty and danger, seduction and doom, lending his paintings a subliminal tension that goes far beyond the decorative.

Throughout his life, Waterhouse remained true to his own pictorial world and was hardly deterred by the avant-garde trends of his time - Impressionism, Expressionism and finally Abstract Modernism. This consistency was interpreted by some critics as backward-looking, but it gave his work an inner coherence and recognizability that made it independent of the fashion trends of his time. His ability to combine ancient and literary material with an immediate emotional impact made him a painter whose pictures appealed to a wide audience and contrasted the academic rigor of his training with a human warmth and vitality.

John William Waterhouse died in London in 1917, leaving behind an oeuvre of around two hundred paintings that had achieved great recognition during his lifetime, but at times fell into the shadow of modernism during the course of the 20th century. In recent decades, his work has undergone an extraordinary rediscovery. Today, his paintings are considered icons of late Victorian historicism and have a remarkable presence on the international art market and in popular visual culture, while his depictions of female figures from mythology and literature are appreciated as the most convincing and vivid evidence of their genre in 19th century English painting.