John William Waterhouse Picture Study Aid and Art Prints

John William Waterhouse Picture Study Aid

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.

The intention of this picture study aid is to equip the home educator with some basic facts and understanding of a sampling of the work of John William Waterhouse. It is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis or study of each piece or a complete biography of the artist.

About picture study, Ms. Mason recommended keeping learning as simple as possible, especially in the younger years, and put extra emphasis on the images by themselves.

There is 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. (vol 6 pg 216)

Definite teaching is out of the question; suitable ideas are easily given, and a thoughtful love of Art inspired by simple natural talk over the picture at which the child is looking. (PR Article “Picture Talks”)

…we begin now to understand that art is not to be approached by such an acadamised road. It is of the spirit, and in ways of the spirit must we make our attempt. We recognise that the power of appreciating art and of producing to some extent an interpretation of what one sees is as universal as intelligence, imagination, nay, speech, the power of producing words. But there must be knowledge and, in the first place, not the technical knowledge of how to produce, but some reverent knowledge of what has been produced; that is, children should learn pictures, line by line, group by group, by reading, not books, but pictures themselves. A friendly picture-dealer supplies us with half a dozen beautiful little reproductions of the work of some single artist, term by term. After a short story of the artist’s life and a few sympathetic words about his trees or his skies, his river-paths or his figures, the little pictures are studied one at a time; that is, children learn, not merely to see a picture but to look at it, taking in every detail.” (vol 6 pg 214)

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. (vol 6 pg 43)