Lamia

Having exhibited a painting of Lamia in 1905 (now in the Auckland Art Gallery) and made three additional treatments of the two-figure composition, Waterhouse sent to the Royal Academy’s 1909 Summer Exhibition this one-figure picture bearing the same title. In it the same young woman, arranges her hair alone while studying herself in the water’s reflection. Waterhouse had occasionally shown women with one or both breasts exposed, most notably in Echo and Narcissus (1903, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool Museums). Here we glimpse a particularly sensual and intimate moment: the arms are raised to accentuate the breasts, and the hair, bound tightly in 1905, now cascades over both shoulders.

In Greek mythology, Lamia’s unsurpassed beauty beguiled Poseidon or Zeus (depending on the version of the myth) who gave her the gift of the ability to remove her eyes at night so that they would guard her as she slept. Due to her liaison with the god, she invoked the jealousy of Hera who murdered all but one of her children. Consumed and contorted by grief, Lamia abducted and devoured the children of others to avenge her offspring and assuage her grief, she sought vengeance also by sucking the blood of men she seduced; her name means, ‘she who swallows up’. As her crimes multiplied, she became a female demon with the ability to transform herself into a writhing serpent or assume a human form. She is the therianthropic union of woman and snake, the cold blood of the latter overpowering the warmth of the former. Lamia ‘slithered into Christian iconography as the snake in the Garden of Eden, or Adam’s demon first-wife, Lilith. Lamia is both Eve (the carnal female sinner) and the serpent of Eden (the asexual monster and tempter of mankind), her breast is the apple (the poisonous temptation), and her teeth are the punishment. In the fifteenth century, the word Lamiae was applied to witches, continuing Lamia’s connection with pagan evil’ (Simon Toll, Herbert Draper, 1863-1920, A Life Study, 2003, p. 144). In this context, it is interesting that many critics have made a link between Waterhouse’s art and an interest in the occult or Theosophy.

Waterhouse was clearly fascinated by the thrilling dangers of love and beauty, epitomised by the singing femmes fatales of John Keats (1795-1821). In his 1819 retelling, Keats, describes how the god Hermes facilitates the metamorphosis of an iridescent snake, with a ‘Circean’ head of glinting eyes and teeth, into a beautiful woman who remains cold-blooded. Waterhouse’s Lamia entrances with her gaze, touch and, ‘song of love, too sweet for earthly lyres’. Keats never explicitly brands this animal-woman as evil, celebrating instead her beauty and the sensual exhilaration she offers. Waterhouse portrays Lamia as a beautiful, fragile and vulnerable being and, as with many Waterhouse paintings, his Lamia has a dream-like atmosphere as though the figure is lost in a melancholic reverie. There is no depiction or suggestion of the active destruction of the serpent and the only hint to Lamia’s identity is the ‘snakeskin’ which is draped over her lap and which is entwined with the roots of a tree to the figure’s side, perhaps emphasising that this is her essential, inescapable nature.

The subject of the femme fatale and her destructive power and male vulnerability in the face of it, were themes that were treated in European Symbolist pictures from this time, and it is important to consider Waterhouse within this pan-European context, alongside artists such as Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon. Waterhouse‘s femmes fatales lure and entrap their victims by their wistful beauty and melancholic sadness as if they cannot help what they are doing. Waterhouse is playing on male fears of vulnerability; in the face of overwhelming attraction and compulsion there is a psychological anxiety and helplessness. A typical Waterhouse enchantress is not a witch but a beautiful girl with long hair and often with a seductive innocence and vague longing, as if they too are a reluctant victim of something beyond their control. Many of Waterhouse’s pictures are simultaneously ecstatic and cautionary, with a sensual, sometimes erotic, allure. His women are not sculptural in form but are flesh and blood, realistic creatures, painted in such a reflective, contemplative way so as to make the viewer something of a voyeur, as if caught in the act of watching a figure bound up in their reverie. Waterhouse often depicted women by or in water and this association between the force of the feminine and the elemental force of water concurs with the alchemical idea of water being an entirely feminine element. Water is a changing substance: simultaneously life-giving and consuming; gentle and treacherous; pliant and yielding and wilful and intractable. Waterhouse’s female protagonists have the same dichotomy.

This romanticism was apparent in artists of the classical revival, who like the Pre-Raphaelites, hated their nineteenth century environment which they saw as dominated by the mercantile interests of industry, machinery and commerce and which they saw as hostile to serious art. Waterhouse fits into both camps; his early works illustrating the influence of the classical revival, heavily influenced by Alma-Tadema, and the intensity of the Pre-Raphaelites is apparent in many of his works. Waterhouse’s realistic portrayal of subjects sat alongside his love for the dramatic and theatrical which was always tempered by his ideas of beauty. He interpreted scenes with dramatic power whilst always being mindful of the beauty of the drama.

Waterhouse, like many of his contemporaries, was intrigued by the French Impressionist pictures that had stirred such controversy and in the 1880s, influenced by Alma-Tadema’s recent shift to lighter tones, Waterhouse, ‘opened the shutters of his gloomy classical rooms, muted their overlay of melancholy, and experimented with the play of sunlight on his models’ forms. His colours began to lighten and he used shorter, broken brushstrokes that build up, in some areas, to a thicker impasto’ (Peter Trippi, J. W. Waterhouse, London, 2002, p. 43) indicating his absorption of lessons learned from the Impressionists.

Waterhouse was born in Rome to British artist parents, spending his influential childhood years in Italy before the family returned to England after the death of Waterhouse’s mother. Italy seems to have had a continual draw and influence on Waterhouse and he returned there throughout his life. From 1900 to 1917, Waterhouse exhibited every year at the Royal Academy, with only one break in 1915. Tantalisingly little is known of Waterhouse’s private life, he was married with no children, or his artistic beliefs as he was an intensely private man devoted to his art and none of his letters or diaries appear to have survived. He was reticent and modest and not ambitious for worldly success, albeit he was conventionally successful, becoming an ARA in 1885 and a full RA in 1895. Waterhouse’s haunting, ambiguous, intriguing canvases still resonate with a modern audience.