Hylas and the Nymphs

Hylas and the Nymphs, painted in 1896 and now in the Manchester Art Gallery, is one of Waterhouse's most celebrated and frequently reproduced works. The myth from Apollonius of Rhodes's Argonautica tells of the beautiful youth Hylas, companion of Heracles on the Argonauts' voyage, who was pulled beneath a pool by water nymphs enchanted by his beauty and never seen again. Waterhouse depicts the moment of capture: Hylas reaches toward the pool and the nymphs rise from the water, their pale faces and lily-white shoulders breaking the surface. The work was briefly removed from Manchester Art Gallery's walls in 2018 as part of a public debate about representations of women in art, a controversy that made it one of the most-discussed Victorian paintings of the early twenty-first century and drew renewed attention to its remarkable quality.

The composition deploys the circular pool surface as a mirroring, centripetal device: the nymphs rise from its edges, reaching toward the standing Hylas who leans in from outside the frame. Their pale, almost phosphorescent skin against dark water creates the painting's central colour tension. Water-lily pads and flowers punctuate the dark water surface with white and green.