John William Waterhouse Exhibition Poster - The Drawings, Gledhill & Marsden, 1983

A graphite study of a young woman in profile, her gaze lifted and her neck exposed, printed on warm buff-toned paper - imagined as the exhibition poster for a 1983 drawings show at Gledhill & Marsden Fine Art, Mayfair.

John William Waterhouse (1849–1917) occupies an unusual position in British art history: a painter who was fully absorbed into the Royal Academy at its most conservative, yet whose work drew consistently on the Pre-Raphaelite tradition - the literary subjects, the mythological women, the intense attention to female physiognomy. Elected a full Academician in 1895, he exhibited at the RA almost every year from 1874 until his death in 1917, yet his critical reputation through much of the twentieth century rested awkwardly between the academic and the romantic, too conventional for the modernists, too myth-laden for the realists. The early 1980s marked the beginning of serious scholarly and commercial reappraisal, driven partly by the Royal Academy's 1978 Victorian High Renaissance exhibition and anticipating the Tate's major Pre-Raphaelite retrospective of 1984.

This drawing is a preparatory study for Lamia, the subject Waterhouse returned to in paintings of 1905 and 1909, drawn from Keats's 1820 narrative poem of the same name. Keats transformed the ancient Greek myth of a serpent-woman into a meditation on the conflict between beauty and rational knowledge: Lamia, given human form by Hermes, builds a life with the young Corinthian Lycius, only to be unmasked and destroyed at their wedding feast by the cold gaze of the philosopher Apollonius. The drawing shows the model - Muriel Foster, whose address in Chingford was noted by Waterhouse directly on the sheet - in a pose that captures the figure's upward yearning, the neck extended, the profile sharp against the buff paper. Waterhouse's graphite technique in his preparatory studies was direct and assured: broad tonal areas built through hatching, with finer lines reserved for the facial features.

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