Of the painters who, coming later than those just mentioned [Holman Hunt, Millais], have also drawn their inspiration from myth and legend, Mr. J. W. Waterhouse should perhaps be mentioned first. His work at once invites comparison with that of Burne-Jones, because he chose much the same kind of subjects, such as the Greek myths and Arthurian legend. There is a marked difference, however, in the spirit in which the two men have approached such subjects. With Burne-Jones we are clearly in dreamland; Mr. Waterhouse takes us among flesh-and-blood realities. If he were painting scenes from contemporary life he could hardly make them more realistic. The people who believed the mythical and legendary stories must, we think, have thought of them in this way. The figures are realistic, and so are their surroundings. The landscape of his Hylas and the Nymphs has been studied on the spot, and is realised with only less than Pre-Raphaelite literalness. Hylas, and the nymphs who are casting their spell over him, are equally real. The story is being enacted before our eyes. It is so with his Lady of Shalott, both where the curse comes upon her and where she is drifting down the river in her boat, and, indeed with all his pictures. Leighton's formal compositions, with their decorative colour, and Burne-Jones's elaborate designs, the figures in which are intended only to be types, keep us far away from naturalism. In Mr. Waterhouse's work there is less formality in the design, and though the same face may appear again and again to play many different parts, the expression is always varied to suit the parts. Mr. Waterhouse is the son of a painter. He was born in Rome in 1849, and though he was brought to England when only five years old, he was an impressionable child, and the early years spent in the land of romance were probably not the least important in determining his career and the particular direction his art-work would take. That he could look back to treasuring a bit of Pompeian fresco when he was hardly beyond infancy, must have helped to draw him towards the old-time stories he has retold with a naturalism that might almost be called simple.
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[Other painters discussed are Sir William Blake Richmond, Frank Dicksee, Arthur Hacker, Herbert Draper, Thomas Cooper Gotch, Charles H. Shannon, and Maurice Greiffenhagen where we pick up the thread once more]
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Mr. Greiffenhagen's The Sons of God looked upon the Daughters of Men is so powerful that the sonorousness of the Biblical language, and its mystic significance, seem to have been merely transposed from sound into colour. Here it is impossible not to think of Watts, but by no means as if there had been mere imitation or plagiarism. His Idyl in the Liverpool Art Gallery, strong in colour and fine in draughtsmanship, is as elemental--is an as simply profound interpretation of the passionate love of youth and maiden--as Madox Brown's Romeo and Juliet. We have got far away now from the cold Classicism of Leighton and Poynter, further still from the merely decorative loveliness of Albert Moore; and there is warmer blood here than that which courses along the veins of Mr. Waterhouse's people.