John William Waterhouse is among the most popular Victorian artists and many of his paintings, such as The Lady of Shallot, Hylas and the Nymphs and Ophelia, have become icons of femininity recognized the world over. With their compelling composition, glowing color and Impressionist-inflected technique, these paintings are admired for their beauty, yet at the same time they have the power to transport the viewer into a romantic world of myth and legend. Waterhouse s depictions of female beauty reflect his age s complex and ambivalent attitudes towards women, in which Victorian ideals of sentiment and duty commingled with less noble undercurrents of erotic desire and misogyny. Aubrey Noakes sets out to discover the forgotten artist behind so much good work familiar to most of us now, chiefly in reproductions and in visits to provincial galleries, and he succeeds in this provocative and lively study.
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Aubrey Noakes was a man of wide interests and was a contributor to numerous magazines since the age of seventeen.His works included The World of Henry Alken. Charles Spencelayh and his Paintings, London Pride (with Nance Lui Fyson), William Frith: Extraordinary Victorian Painter and Ben Marshall, 1768-1835. He was an art critic for over forty years and lived in Kensington, London.
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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Only for the Watrhouse afficionado...,
By innisart (High Bridge, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Waterhouse (Chaucer Library of Art) (Hardcover)
If you love Waterhouse and would like to understand his contemporaries a little bit better, then by all means purchase this book. However, if you are new to Waterhouse, you would be better served by purchasing either Anthony Hobson's or Peter Trippi's monographs on the artist. Noakes has tried to circumvent the scarcity of information on this very private artist by filling the pages with stories about other artists and their lives. The organization is odd, and the plates, which form the backbone of any artist biography, are poor, often displaying color shifts and bad contrast.
Noakes has obviously done his research into the Victorian era art world and his tangents can be interesting, but the book falls short of those written by his predecessors. I give this book a rating of three stars ("It's OK"), whereas the other books on Waterhouse written by the previously mentioned authors would receive five stars each.
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