JOHN WILLIAM WATERHOUSE, R.A. (BRITISH, 1849-1917)
JOHN WILLIAM WATERHOUSE, R.A. (BRITISH, 1849-1917)
JOHN WILLIAM WATERHOUSE, R.A. (BRITISH, 1849-1917)
JOHN WILLIAM WATERHOUSE, R.A. (BRITISH, 1849-1917)
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Property of a Florida Collector
JOHN WILLIAM WATERHOUSE, R.A. (BRITISH, 1849-1917)

Phyllis

细节
JOHN WILLIAM WATERHOUSE, R.A. (BRITISH, 1849-1917)
Phyllis
oil on canvas
16 x 13 ½ in. (40.6 x 34.3 cm.)
来源
Anonymous sale; Sotheby’s, London, 22 March 1989, lot 175.
with J. S. Maas & Son, London.
Private collection, US.
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner.
出版
A. L. Baldry, 'Some Recent Work by Mr J.W. Waterhouse, R.A.', The Studio, vol. LIII, no. 221, London, August 1911, p. 174, illustrated, as Study in oils for 'Phyllis' ('Phyllis and Demophoon').
A. Hobson, The Art and Life of J.W. Waterhouse, R.A., London, 1980, p. 189, no. 157.
A. Hobson, J.W. Waterhouse, Oxford, 1989, pp. 57, 60, pl. 40, illustrated, as Study for Hylas and the Nymphs.
展览
New York, Shepherd Gallery, English Romantic Art 1850–1920: Pre-Raphaelites, Academics, Symbolists: Drawings, Watercolours, Graphics and Paintings, 18 October – 18 November 1989, no. 138.

荣誉呈献

Laura H. Mathis
Laura H. Mathis VP, Specialist, Head of Sale

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拍品专文

This oil study of a girl’s head encapsulates everything that has drawn viewers to the artist J. W. Waterhouse’s idealization of feminine beauty since he perfected it in the 1890s. This young woman—one of his favorite models, though her name remains unknown—has the red hair, blue eyes, rosy cheeks, and red-lipped mouth widely associated with Waterhouse, all delineated superbly and set in a backdrop of bold, dynamic brushstrokes that makes the head 'pop' even more compellingly.
We know this head was painted in preparation for Waterhouse’s larger canvas, Phyllis and Demophoön—first exhibited at London’s Royal Academy in 1907 (no. 232)—because it was illustrated in color and captioned exactly as such during the artist’s lifetime. The Studio (magazine) article in which it appeared was authored by the critic Alfred Lys Baldry—a longtime champion of Waterhouse who surely would have checked with the artist before going to press. Baldry’s article also illustrates the final version of Phyllis and Demophoön, then owned by Waterhouse’s leading patron of the time, H.W. Henderson, Esq.
As with his painted treatments of Ariadne (1898), Medea (1907), and Penelope (1912), Waterhouse had consulted Ovid’s Heroides, a volume of poems recounting the ordeals that women endure through the actions (or inactions) of men. During his journey home from the Trojan War, the Greek hero Demophoön falls in love with Phyllis, daughter of the Thracian king. When he fails to keep his promise to return and marry her, Phyllis hangs herself. Fortunately, the gods take pity by transforming her into an almond tree. Demophoön finally returns and remorsefully embraces the barren tree, which suddenly sprouts blossoms. Although Phyllis emerges to forgive her faithless lover, she cannot regain human form.
Thanks to Waterhouse’s characteristic discretion—on full display in this sensitive study—viewers grasped the powerful pathos without having to witness Phyllis’s anguish or suicide. She gazes intently, yet does not threaten, and her emergence from the almond tree underscores Waterhouse’s longstanding fascination with another of Ovid’s themes—metamorphoses—specifically the magical transformation of human beings into flowers, trees, and animals. Also evident is Waterhouse’s close association of women with flowers, variously their beauty, inevitable decay, and function as vessels of new growth.
These themes, along with the quintessentially Romantic one of unfulfilled love, were clearly on Waterhouse’s mind in the mid-1900s: at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition of 1907, he exhibited both Phyllis and Demophoön and Isabella and the Pot of Basil (now both in private collections), in which Keats’s heroine buries her murdered lover’s head in a plant she waters with her tears.
Unusually for Waterhouse, a range of preparatory drawings and oil studies for Phyllis and Demophoön have survived, underscoring his determination to maximize the scene’s aesthetic and emotional impact. Particularly intriguing is his decision—confirmed by this study and several pencil sketches now in the Victoria and Albert Museum—to reverse the composition fairly late in the process. Here Phyllis gazes toward our right, but in the final version she faces left.
It is unclear why Waterhouse made this change, yet either way our attention remains riveted on the heartbreaking gaze exchanged by the lovers, a device he had been refining since the masterpieces of the previous decade, notably Hylas and the Nymphs (1896, Manchester Art Gallery). In fact, Demophoön was modeled by the same beardless youth who posed as Hylas, raising the possibility that Waterhouse worked from older drawings he had kept in his studio. For these reasons, it is understandable that, in 1989, Waterhouse biographer Anthony Hobson associated this study with one of the seven female heads in Hylas and the Nymphs. Ultimately, however, its caption in the 1911 Studio article must prevail.
Interestingly, the present canvas was originally on a stretcher measuring 14 by 12 inches (38 x 30.5 cm). Since its last public appearance in 1989, it has been taken off that stretcher and placed on a larger one which reveals to great advantage the previously invisible margins that Waterhouse had painted himself.
We are grateful to Peter Trippi for his help in preparing this catalogue entry and for contributing this note.

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