The Enchanted Garden

The Enchanted Garden, painted in 1916 and now at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, is one of Waterhouse's last major canvases and one of the most visually opulent works of his career. Inspired by a scene from Boccaccio's Decameron in which young aristocrats retreat to a garden of perfect beauty during the Black Death, the painting transforms this literary source into a purely sensory celebration of floral abundance, feminine beauty, and summer light. Waterhouse never completed the painting fully — areas of the canvas show pentimenti and unresolved passages — yet in its unfinished state it serves as a record of his working method and his ambitions for colour and surface. The Lady Lever Art Gallery, built by Lord Leverhulme to house his Victorian art collection, is a particularly fitting institutional home for this flamboyant late work.

The canvas demonstrates Waterhouse's late handling at its freest and most confident, with roses, arbour structures, and figures built up in broad, decisive strokes. Unfinished passages reveal the layered underpainting — warm, toned ground visible through thin upper layers — and show how Waterhouse established his compositions through tonal architecture before adding colour details. The palette is extraordinarily warm, dominated by rose reds, pinks, and warm greens.