Matilda

John William Waterhouse’s *Matilda* is one of those paintings that sneaks up on you—not with grandeur, but with a quiet, almost unsettling intimacy. The Pre-Raphaelite obsession with literary heroines finds its way here, though Waterhouse, as usual, sidesteps pure idealism for something more ambiguous. The figure—likely drawn from Dante’s *Purgatorio*—isn’t just a passive muse; there’s a tension in her posture, a slight stiffness in the drapery that suggests she’s caught between resignation and something fiercer. The palette, all muted greens and dusky golds, feels less like a romanticized medieval dream and more like a real, damp afternoon where the light won’t quite cooperate. You can almost smell the wet grass.
Waterhouse had a knack for making myth feel uncomfortably human, and *Matilda* is no exception. Compare it to his later *Ophelia* or even *The Lady of Shalott*—there’s none of that liquid tragedy here. Instead, the composition feels oddly grounded, even claustrophobic, as if the landscape is pressing in on her. The Pre-Raphaelites loved their doomed women, sure, but Waterhouse’s version always seemed more irritated than doomed, like they’d read the script and weren’t thrilled about it. His brushwork, especially in the folds of her dress, has that slightly rushed quality he favored in his later years, where precision gives way to something more impatient. It’s a painting that doesn’t want to be pretty, even when it is.
The private collection status adds another layer of frustration—it’s one of those works you’ll likely only ever see in reproductions, which flatten the weird, almost sticky texture of his paint. Waterhouse once said he preferred “the trouble of actual painting” to idealized sketches, and *Matilda* shows it. There’s mud in the colors, literally and figuratively. If you squint, you can spot echoes of Burne-Jones in the elongation of her fingers, but where Burne-Jones would’ve made her ethereal, Waterhouse lets her look like she’s been standing there too long, waiting for someone who isn’t coming. It’s the kind of detail that makes you wonder if he enjoyed subverting the very traditions he was steeped in. Or maybe he just liked painting annoyed women. Hard to say.