Echo and Narcissus

John William Waterhouse's 'Echo and Narcissus' (1903) depicts one of the most poignant of Ovid's myths — the youth Narcissus who fell in love with his own reflection and the nymph Echo who could only repeat others' words and faded away from unrequited love. Waterhouse was the most technically accomplished Late Pre-Raphaelite painter, and his mythological subjects combined careful archaeological research with a quality of dreaming beauty that was entirely his own. The Echo and Narcissus subject gave him the opportunity to paint the idealized male and female figures within the natural landscape setting that was one of his primary pictorial environments.

Waterhouse renders the encounter of Echo and Narcissus with his characteristic combination of accurate period detail (the costume, the pool setting) and the quality of timeless beauty that distinguished his figure work. His handling of the water's reflective surface — central to the Narcissus myth — demonstrates his mastery of this technically demanding subject. The figures' relationship within the composition and their psychological states (Narcissus's self-absorbed gaze, Echo's yearning) create the myth's emotional content.