The water nymph

The Water Nymph (1923) represents John Collier returning in his late career to mythological and pastoral subjects that had occupied him in the 1880s and 1890s. By 1923 Collier was nearly seventy, but he continued to exhibit at the Royal Academy and to produce imaginative subjects alongside his portrait commissions. The water nymph was a staple subject of Victorian and Edwardian academic painting — Waterhouse's many nymph subjects had established a model of the classical female figure in a naturalistic watery setting — and Collier's engagement with the theme participates in this established tradition. The interwar period saw a curious persistence of late Victorian academic styles in British painting even as the avant-garde had moved toward Post-Impressionism, Vorticism, and abstraction. Conservative collectors and exhibitors continued to prize the kind of graceful mythological painting Collier could still produce. The Water Nymph in this context is both a stylistic continuation and a slight anachronism — a late Victorian sensibility expressed in a changed cultural moment. The painting may show some adaptation to the looser brushwork of Collier's late style while retaining the compositional and figural conventions of his earlier mythological works.

Oil on canvas with the more fluid handling characteristic of Collier's late work. The challenge of depicting a water setting — reflections, the translucency of water, the effect of light on a wet or submerged figure — is addressed through carefully layered glazes and broken brushwork suggesting movement. The figure retains academic precision in anatomy.