The Skull in Waterhouse’s ‘Crystal Ball’ (1902)

Waterhouse exhibited this painting at Burlington House in 1902, and sold it soon after. The purchaser, however, did not like one detail: the presence of a skull on the table in front of the woman. This was painted out, by extending the reach of the curtain behind it. Then in 1994 the painting came to Christies to be auctioned. It was restored, the overpainting removed along with the old varnish (which you can see above, was pretty cracked) and the skull revealed once more. This is what the painting looked like when Christies sold it, pretty much as Waterhouse had originally painted it:

We may think the subject is some kind of sorceress or witch — the grimoire on the table, the skull, the scrying ball after which the paining is named. Her scarlet dress, with its pattern of dragon (are they?) roundels on the skirt, reinforce this idea: it’s the kind of garb a medieval sorceress might wear, we think. But then, the model’s face is so youthful, so girlish and innocent, that it rather undermines this reading. Perhaps she is not a witch, but a maiden, a girl who has wandered into the magician’s chamber whilst he is away — say, he was pursuing the mystic arts all night, and now that day has come, and the curtain drawn back, he has gone off to rest. She picks up his mystic ball, hoping to see something in it: the location of her lover, perhaps. That’s pretty speculative, I know.

Come at this another way: the skull. What strikes me is the way that skull-shape is reproduced in the composition of the whole canvas, a kind of formal echo: the round arch behind the girl like the arc of its cranium; the up-curving shape of the chair like a detached jaw-bone; the three smaller yellow filled-arches beneath the window, like eye and nose sockets; the bone-coloured marble of the wall, and pallor of the girl. The whole figuration draws the eye to the crystal ball, another sphere, like the skull. Perhaps the way to read this image is as a memento mori, in which case the youthfulness of the central figure is deliberately rendered as a specific contrast: youth and death.

Another consideration is that this woman is indeed supposed to be a dark sorceress, but that because Waterhouse drew on only a small number of models, all of whom looked rather alike, he ended up with this girlish individual. In her overview of Waterhouse’s oeuvre Carole Silver notes that ‘because Waterhouse tended to use the same few models, one face looks out from all his canvases’.

The pictured maidens are all young, slender, pale, and brown or auburn-haired; their eyes are set in a dreamy gaze and their lips are slightly parted. Usually seated or reclining, the classical beauties are arrayed in diaphanous garments with one small breast either revealed or lightly veiled. This pose — and it is almost obsessively repeated from his early Household Gods (1880) through multiple Circes and Lamias and Psyches as well as in paintings of Echo, Pandora, Ariadne, and Venus — is clearly one he finds erotic. The Mermaid, the Siren, the Naiad, the Hamadryad, and the seven Nymphs who seduce Hylas are depicted with both breasts bared, and Waterhouse apparently found these states of half-undress both sexy and saleable. Yet the women are languid rather than sensuous, lacking even the intensity of the half-sleeping beauties in Leighton’s Flaming June (1894). Perhaps the provocative dress and subject matter serve commercial purposes; the pictures may be designed to titillate potential purchasers looking for Victorian pinups within the bounds of decency. The models’ somnambulant postures seem appropriate for bachelor bedrooms. The fully dressed female figures in his medieval, Renaissance, and late non-narrative paintings have a somewhat different effect. They too lack force, but being less obviously erotic, they can (as in Fair Rosamund of 1916) suggest psychological complexity. [Carole G. Silver, ‘John Waterhouse Revisited’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 39:1 (2011), 266]

Here’s ‘Fair Rosamund’:

Browse this gallery for lots of examples of the boobs-out, plaintive, chilly-looking, sexy-if-you-like-that-kind-of-thing brunette siren or mermaid soft-core other sort of painting, if you fancy it. I’m not here to adorn the metaphorical wall of your bachelor bedroom with smut.

Waterhouse is sometimes bracketed with the Pre-Raphaelites: his focus on women, his medievalism, the bright colours and vividness of his style, the literary allusions to Romantic poetry. But where the classic Pre-Raphaelites — artists a generation older than Waterhouse — painted with scrupulous precision, in enormous sometimes brittle and fiddlesome detail, usually on a white ground, Waterhouse’s brushstrokes are looser, his detail sketchier — the trees in the background of the ‘Crystal Ball’, above, for example, are almost impressionistic. That’s not a random connection: Waterhouse was directly influenced by the developments in French art at the end of the nineteenth-century. Robert Upstone (‘Between Innovation and Tradition: Waterhouse and Modern French Painting’ [2009]) notes that ‘by the late 1880s Waterhouse had begun to paint in what was thought of as the “French” style, that is, with broad, visible brushstrokes, a sense of rapid movement, and a lack of high finish — techniques which connect him to the French Naturalists and Impressionists’. And perhaps there is something Symbolist, rather than Pre-Raphaelite, about this picture of a young woman, and a crystal ball, and a skull, that is itself formally echoing the curving lineaments of the skull.