Pandora

Pandora, painted in 1896, depicts the figure from Hesiod's Theogony who was created by the gods as a punishment for humanity following Prometheus's theft of fire. Pandora's curiosity led her to open a jar or box containing all the world's evils, releasing them into the world while hope alone remained trapped inside. The myth was endlessly revisited by Victorian painters because it combined female beauty, curiosity, transgression, and catastrophic consequence in a single image — a mythological template for anxieties about female knowledge and action. Waterhouse's Pandora, like his Circe and his Lamia, belongs to the archetype of the beautiful woman whose actions have world-altering consequences. The 1896 date places it in a highly productive cluster of mythological canvases.

The composition turns on the central moment of the jar being opened: Pandora's posture, the jar or box's lid, and the implicit release of what it contains give the painting its dramatic energy. Warm light emphasises the figure's beauty while the act of opening introduces an element of compositional tension. The palette is likely warm and rich, appropriate to the ambiguous moment the myth describes.