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Lot Essay
After decades away from public view, the reappearance of J.W. Waterhouse’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil is cause for celebration. Though it can be admired solely for its compelling composition, glowing colours, and expressive brushwork, this outstanding example of Waterhouse’s mature period also offers intriguing thematic and historical insights.
Coursing through Waterhouse’s five decades of picture-making is his fascination with melancholy, magic, and the dangers of love. The story of Isabella and the Pot of Basil is quintessentially Romantic. The Florentine poet Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) included it in his cycle of 100 tales, Il Decamerone, and it was this to which John Keats (1795–1821) turned for his own poem of 1820, Isabella, or, The Pot of Basil: A Story from Boccaccio. The Florentine maiden Isabella is in love with Lorenzo, who works as a clerk for her two merchant-brothers. They murder the young man and bury him in a forest, but he appears to Isabella in a vision and tells her where to find his corpse. She exhumes his head and hides it in a pot of sweet basil, sustaining the increasingly vigorous plant with her tears, a particularly intimate form of the feminine element of water. Having discovered her secret, the brothers steal away with the pot, so Isabella withers and dies, having lost her beauty and sanity through obsessive grief.
Making something beautiful from so melancholy a subject was one of Waterhouse’s intrinsic talents, and as a third-generation Pre-Raphaelite, he had numerous inspirations on which to draw. The first generation’s leaders—William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti—had all treated the theme of Isabella, but most relevant is Hunt’s 1868 painting (Fig. 1, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne), which shows the girl caressing her majolica pot in an opulently decorated chamber. Waterhouse transferred the scene to a Renaissance garden, suggesting the flow of Isabella’s tears through the cascading effect of her long hair, gown, and sleeves, which guide our eye along an L-shaped arc leading from the basil leaves to her hem. Flowers and foliage figure prominently in both Keats’s poem and Waterhouse’s garden; though the latter appears lushly verdant, its aura of decay is symbolized by the ominous skull adorning the pedestal on which Isabella leans.
Various details epitomise Waterhouse’s practice in the first decade of the twentieth century; here he revels in the lively patterning of medievalised sleeves, the virtuosic white-on-white brushwork of the loose-fitting over-dress, and the formal yet verdant Renaissance gardens championed by such British landscape designers as Harold Peto. Equally noteworthy is the multi-hued brushwork that enlivens the huge copper planter and also the flickering shadows in the grassy area that connects the staircase to the foreground where Isabella kneels. Waterhouse had already mastered the evocative motif of a kneeling woman in profile with Mariana in the South (Fig. 2, c. 1897, Cecil French Bequest, Hammersmith and Fulham Council, London), based on Tennyson’s poem about a Renaissance maiden abandoned by her lover. The faces of Mariana and Isabella belong to the same model, on whom Waterhouse relied from the 1890s onward. Here she is depicted with her customary long red hair and pink cheeks, but also with puffy eyes reddened from crying.
In 1896, the critic Claude Phillips noted that ‘For a cold pseudo-classicism, which to-day convinces neither the painter nor his public, Mr. J.W. Waterhouse substitutes a romanticism with which his own artistic temperament, as well as that of his [English] race, is thoroughly in accord’ (Academy 1255, 23 May 1896, p. 432). Because Waterhouse found emotional power in both classical and romantic literature, he celebrated women as wide-ranging as Ovid’s Circe and Flora, Psyche, Ariadne, Tennyson’s Mariana and Lady Clare, and Shakespeare’s Juliet. It makes perfect sense that he also admired the women of Keats. In 1893, he exhibited at the Royal Academy his vision of La Belle Dame Sans Merci (Hessiches Landesmuseum Darmstadt), in which a seemingly fragile girl enchants an armoured knight crouching above her in a darkened wood. Keats resurfaced in 1905, when Waterhouse sent to the Academy his first of two treatments of Lamia. This shows another knight gazing down into the eyes of a red-haired temptress.
Isabella appeared two years later, and though she is not a femme fatale like her two predecessors, she is not entirely to be pitied. The art journalist Rose E.D. Sketchley’s carefully worded monograph on Waterhouse (1909) points to his agenda: Full comprehension of his pictures, she argued, was reserved ‘for those alone who can feel the action of the spirit through the shape and course of Greek myth and mediaeval romance’ (R.E.D. Sketchley, ‘The Art of J.W. Waterhouse, R.A.’, The Art Journal [Christmas Number], December 1909, p. 18.). Sketchley marked Waterhouse as a Romantic visionary by arguing that his mythic pictures correspond directly with elements in the tapestry of Greek myth’s most famous weaver, Persephone. Various figures such as Isabella, Lamia, Mariana, the Lady of Shalott, and Pandora represent ‘the analogy between the unfolding of the rose through earth, and of the soul through suffering’ (Ibid., p. 23). Although it is impossible to prove that Waterhouse had begun painting The Lady of Shalott in 1886 with these associations in mind, by 1907 he surely encouraged Sketchley to advance this occultist interpretation of his oeuvre.
Sketchley was right to invoke the profound Symbolist meanings within Waterhouse’s pictures, which offer insights into the timeless concerns of desire, death, regeneration, and immortality. Again and again he highlighted the magical transformation of mortals’ bodies into non-human forms as emblems of the passage from death to eternal life, usually through encounters of intense passion or violence. Emerging from Waterhouse’s studio around the same time as Isabella and the Pot of Basil were two more transformations of flesh into foliage, both drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Phyllis and Demophoön (1907) and Apollo and Daphne (1908).
Waterhouse’s paintings from this period reflect his deep and fluent engagement with narratives from both the romantic and classical traditions. Isabella and the Pot of Basil is a superb example of the former, and its return to the limelight after so many years of private ownership will surely be a revelation for those fortunate enough to see it in person this season.
We are grateful to Peter Trippi for his assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.
Coursing through Waterhouse’s five decades of picture-making is his fascination with melancholy, magic, and the dangers of love. The story of Isabella and the Pot of Basil is quintessentially Romantic. The Florentine poet Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) included it in his cycle of 100 tales, Il Decamerone, and it was this to which John Keats (1795–1821) turned for his own poem of 1820, Isabella, or, The Pot of Basil: A Story from Boccaccio. The Florentine maiden Isabella is in love with Lorenzo, who works as a clerk for her two merchant-brothers. They murder the young man and bury him in a forest, but he appears to Isabella in a vision and tells her where to find his corpse. She exhumes his head and hides it in a pot of sweet basil, sustaining the increasingly vigorous plant with her tears, a particularly intimate form of the feminine element of water. Having discovered her secret, the brothers steal away with the pot, so Isabella withers and dies, having lost her beauty and sanity through obsessive grief.
Making something beautiful from so melancholy a subject was one of Waterhouse’s intrinsic talents, and as a third-generation Pre-Raphaelite, he had numerous inspirations on which to draw. The first generation’s leaders—William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti—had all treated the theme of Isabella, but most relevant is Hunt’s 1868 painting (Fig. 1, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne), which shows the girl caressing her majolica pot in an opulently decorated chamber. Waterhouse transferred the scene to a Renaissance garden, suggesting the flow of Isabella’s tears through the cascading effect of her long hair, gown, and sleeves, which guide our eye along an L-shaped arc leading from the basil leaves to her hem. Flowers and foliage figure prominently in both Keats’s poem and Waterhouse’s garden; though the latter appears lushly verdant, its aura of decay is symbolized by the ominous skull adorning the pedestal on which Isabella leans.
Various details epitomise Waterhouse’s practice in the first decade of the twentieth century; here he revels in the lively patterning of medievalised sleeves, the virtuosic white-on-white brushwork of the loose-fitting over-dress, and the formal yet verdant Renaissance gardens championed by such British landscape designers as Harold Peto. Equally noteworthy is the multi-hued brushwork that enlivens the huge copper planter and also the flickering shadows in the grassy area that connects the staircase to the foreground where Isabella kneels. Waterhouse had already mastered the evocative motif of a kneeling woman in profile with Mariana in the South (Fig. 2, c. 1897, Cecil French Bequest, Hammersmith and Fulham Council, London), based on Tennyson’s poem about a Renaissance maiden abandoned by her lover. The faces of Mariana and Isabella belong to the same model, on whom Waterhouse relied from the 1890s onward. Here she is depicted with her customary long red hair and pink cheeks, but also with puffy eyes reddened from crying.
In 1896, the critic Claude Phillips noted that ‘For a cold pseudo-classicism, which to-day convinces neither the painter nor his public, Mr. J.W. Waterhouse substitutes a romanticism with which his own artistic temperament, as well as that of his [English] race, is thoroughly in accord’ (Academy 1255, 23 May 1896, p. 432). Because Waterhouse found emotional power in both classical and romantic literature, he celebrated women as wide-ranging as Ovid’s Circe and Flora, Psyche, Ariadne, Tennyson’s Mariana and Lady Clare, and Shakespeare’s Juliet. It makes perfect sense that he also admired the women of Keats. In 1893, he exhibited at the Royal Academy his vision of La Belle Dame Sans Merci (Hessiches Landesmuseum Darmstadt), in which a seemingly fragile girl enchants an armoured knight crouching above her in a darkened wood. Keats resurfaced in 1905, when Waterhouse sent to the Academy his first of two treatments of Lamia. This shows another knight gazing down into the eyes of a red-haired temptress.
Isabella appeared two years later, and though she is not a femme fatale like her two predecessors, she is not entirely to be pitied. The art journalist Rose E.D. Sketchley’s carefully worded monograph on Waterhouse (1909) points to his agenda: Full comprehension of his pictures, she argued, was reserved ‘for those alone who can feel the action of the spirit through the shape and course of Greek myth and mediaeval romance’ (R.E.D. Sketchley, ‘The Art of J.W. Waterhouse, R.A.’, The Art Journal [Christmas Number], December 1909, p. 18.). Sketchley marked Waterhouse as a Romantic visionary by arguing that his mythic pictures correspond directly with elements in the tapestry of Greek myth’s most famous weaver, Persephone. Various figures such as Isabella, Lamia, Mariana, the Lady of Shalott, and Pandora represent ‘the analogy between the unfolding of the rose through earth, and of the soul through suffering’ (Ibid., p. 23). Although it is impossible to prove that Waterhouse had begun painting The Lady of Shalott in 1886 with these associations in mind, by 1907 he surely encouraged Sketchley to advance this occultist interpretation of his oeuvre.
Sketchley was right to invoke the profound Symbolist meanings within Waterhouse’s pictures, which offer insights into the timeless concerns of desire, death, regeneration, and immortality. Again and again he highlighted the magical transformation of mortals’ bodies into non-human forms as emblems of the passage from death to eternal life, usually through encounters of intense passion or violence. Emerging from Waterhouse’s studio around the same time as Isabella and the Pot of Basil were two more transformations of flesh into foliage, both drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Phyllis and Demophoön (1907) and Apollo and Daphne (1908).
Waterhouse’s paintings from this period reflect his deep and fluent engagement with narratives from both the romantic and classical traditions. Isabella and the Pot of Basil is a superb example of the former, and its return to the limelight after so many years of private ownership will surely be a revelation for those fortunate enough to see it in person this season.
We are grateful to Peter Trippi for his assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.