Day Dreams

Day Dreams, executed in gouache in 1879, belongs to the intimate, small-scale works Waterhouse produced alongside his larger Salon canvases during the late 1870s. Gouache — opaque watercolour — was a medium that allowed rapid execution and a chalky, matte finish quite different from the luminous surfaces of oil paint, and Victorian painters used it extensively for sketches, study works, and saleable smaller compositions. The figure engaged in reverie or meditation was a favourite subject in late Victorian art: it evoked feminine interiority, sensibility, and poetic awareness, all qualities the period valued and projected onto ideali­sed female subjects. Waterhouse's treatment is characteristically focused on the single figure, setting her against a relatively spare background that concentrates all pictorial attention on her expression and bearing. The gouache medium lends the work a freshness and spontaneity somewhat different from his more finished oil paintings.

Gouache's opacity allows Waterhouse to work from dark to light, adding white highlights directly rather than reserving the paper. The matte surface creates a soft, velvety effect particularly suited to rendering skin and fabric in dreamy, diffused light. Contours are gently blurred at the edges, contributing to the reverie the title announces.