John William Waterhouse Picture Study and Art Prints for Homeschool Art Appreciation

To read more about Charlotte Mason picture study and to see the other Picture Study Aids I have available, click here.

The key to Waterhouse’s style is his unique gift for combining reality and poetry. Perhaps more than any other Victorian classical painter, Waterhouse makes the legends of antiquity come alive.

Christopher Wood, Olympian Dreamers

I wrote my first John William Waterhouse Picture Study Aid back in 2019, and it was honestly one of the most enjoyable Picture Study Aids I’ve made, in part due to the quote above. I loved how Waterhouse used poems and ancient texts to inspire the scenes on his canvas. He brought the Lady of Shalott, as well as Jason and Medea, to life in beautiful and detailed ways.

At the time, my oldest was in AmblesideOnline Year 2. We hadn’t yet dipped our toes into the world of Greek and Roman mythology or Arthurian legend, so I hadn’t been introduced to many of the stories he illustrates in his paintings. However, as we’ve made our way through those tales, mainly in Thomas Bulfinch’s Age of Fable, I have been able to recall specific paintings that matched specific stories. It has made me appreciate the art and the skill with which he painted these scenes all the more.

I’m happy to announce that I recently refreshed and updated the original John William Waterhouse Picture Study Aid I made in 2019, and it’s available again for download and in print form! This 26-page Picture Study Aid includes a summary of the early life of English Romantic painter John William Waterhouse (who is also often included in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood though he was active later), key topics about seven of his artworks (see below), and seven printable versions of the paintings (without artist names or titles) with the PDF (or professional art prints with the printed book).

The pieces covered include:

• Diogenes (1882)
• The Favourites of the Emperor Honorius (1883)
• The Lady of Shalott (1888)
• Ulysses and the Sirens (1891)
• Saint Cecilia (1895)
• Jason and Medea (1907)
• Penelope and the Suitors (1912)

I include a brief overview of Charlotte Mason picture study at the beginning of the file; however, I have also written posts here on the blog about why it is important and how we do it in our home and homeschool co-op.

You can get your copy at the link at the end of the post!

Caveats

This guide is by no means an exhaustive analysis or study of each piece, which is intentional. I tried to keep it all very simple in the spirit of there being:

…no talk about schools of painting, little about style; consideration of these matters comes in later life, the first and most important thing is to know the pictures themselves. As in a worthy book we leave the author to tell his own tale, so do we trust a picture to tell its tale through the medium the artist gave it. In the region of art as else-where we shut out the middleman.

CHARLOTTE MASON (VOL 6 PG 216)

This Picture Study Aid is meant to offer basic information about the artists as well as ready answers should your student ask about a particular aspect of a piece and the explanation isn’t readily evident. Ms. Mason emphasized not focusing on strict academic discourse when doing picture study but rather simply exposing students to the art itself:

His education should furnish him with whole galleries of mental pictures, pictures by great artists old and new;––…––in fact, every child should leave school with at least a couple of hundred pictures by great masters hanging permanently in the halls of his imagination, to say nothing of great buildings, sculpture, beauty of form and colour in things he sees. Perhaps we might secure at least a hundred lovely landscapes too,––sunsets, cloudscapes, starlight nights. At any rate he should go forth well furnished because imagination has the property of magical expansion, the more it holds the more it will hold.

CHARLOTTE MASON (VOL 6 PG 43)

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