I have always been quite a lover of J.W. Waterhouse work, those soft eerie figures in heavily textured environments affected me a lot when I was growing as an artist; and of course the mysteries of the mythical subjects were inflaming my imagination.
While you can find some books with a catalog of his work and his life, I couldn’t find much on his technique and process of painting. So I thought, here we go, let’s get on an adventure and try to solve some of those questions. I will try whenever I can to differentiate my own theories from the factual proofs that can be found in historical letters and research.
Waterhouse studied at the Royal Academy in London after having paint under his father, also a painter. From there we can deduce that even if he entered the school as a sculptor (which must have helped a lot when he painted), must have learn how to paint from the « academic » method dispensed then, a method similar to the “French Academic” method of this century. He probably used a more and more personal method as he became more experienced, has most painter do.
THE PROCESS
COMPOSITION
As we can learn from the few books on his work, Waterhouse had the tendency to “use the pose of the figure idea as a basis for his paintings”, he usually started with simple sketches to illustrate the composition:
There are some mentions of lot sketchbooks filled with studies and sketches, I couldn’t find them but some drawings were available online.
DRAWING STUDIES
Once the composition was defined, he worked with models to pose for him and did some more complete drawing studies from life.
OIL SKETCHES
Then he started working on small oil comp as color studies and sometimes with watercolor, trying new ideas:
FINAL PAINTING PROCESS
I’m not exactly sure if he used some kind of drawing reporting process from studies or if he did some advanced drawing directly on the canvas with chalk or charcoal. But we can definitely see that he used broad dark painting strokes to establish some parts of the drawing and then laid midtones/local colors of the elements before starting to sculpt them.
Waterhouse, JW - The Rose Bower (1910)
“They seem to have no idea of setting a palette and are too much addicted to the use of small brushes.”
FULL PROCESS EXEMPLES
Final notes:
John William Waterhouse process and techniques seems not to be so different from the usual process of this time, as we can easily find similarity with other painters’process such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema, another favorite of mine:
Lawrence Alma-Tadema - unfinished painting
Sources and thanks:
The art and life of J.W. Waterhouse, R A, 1849-1917 by Hobson, Anthony, 1920
J.W. Waterhouse by Anthony Hobson, 1989
https://johnwilliamwaterhouse.home.blog/
https://www.muddycolors.com/2018/09/studies-and-unfinished-works/
Ramon Hurtado advices