An excerpt from 'A Painter of Pictures' by the Irish artist Jack Butler Yeats who remembered a visit to Waterhouse's studio. The article was published in The Freeman, 4th January, 1922.
"The late Mr. Waterhouse, the distinguished English painter, was a friend of mine. One day, just before I came to America, I paid a visit to his studio. He had built up an assemblage of I forget what objects, and these he was diligently painting. He himself, very like a savant rather than an artist, had all the docility and charm of a great student. His pictures were careful transcriptions of fact, as he saw it with his faithful eyes--photography rather than art, except that over the whole picture was a veil of ideality reminiscent of Burne-Jones, the artist at that time most fashionable in literary circles...Mr. Waterhouse sought an exact transcription of facts, as seen with the physical eye."
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