Looking in Detail at a Master Work on Inside Out Upside Down Gallery Site

Looking in Detail at a Master Work

This exercise is a close observation of a piece of a work to learn its technical elements. We will dissect the elements of a section of a J.W. Waterhouse image to enable us to understand how he painted it and why it succeeds. The painting chosen is acknowledged as the best of Waterhouse’s history paintings, Miriamne.

What we are looking at is a belt buckle and cloth belt, surrounded by folds of semi-sheer material.

To describe the belt buckle in words we would say that:

• The buckle covers are silver discs on either side of the actual central buckle, with a flat outer edge that has green emeralds placed around the edge.
• Inside the buckle cover edge is a polished domed central disc that has a large emerald at it’s highest point.
• At the centre of the buckle is a disc that has smaller emeralds surrounding a large flat central emerald.

The materials that are being inferred are polished green stones and polished silver surfaces. To bring these to life the artist has chosen to use colours that when viewed in combination will create the illusion of the materials, the polish and the reflections that would exist on the surfaces in the context of this image. As we can see by looking at the image of the buckle independently of the context it is almost impossible to determine what the object is and its shape.

Colour and shape inference are specific to the image in which the belt buckle sits. The artist painted this picture over a period of many months. He was very meticulous in working on each part of the picture to ensure that it held just the right amount of emphasis in the overall picture. Thus the belt buckle, though giving the appearance of a very brilliantly coloured object, does not draw the eye away from the focal point of the image.

To assist with understanding the colours used it is essential that we understand the basic colour relationship in the broader image. There is no pure white paint in the image; this has been done to ensure that the relationship between the fore and back grounds is not excessively garish. The colours of the dress are based on the underlying colours of the back ground; this ensures harmony between the fore and back grounds. In effect the painting is largely tonal, with the fore ground being de-saturated while the background is heavily saturated. The tonal relationship is easily understood by the viewer’s eye, areas reflecting light become progressively brighter the closer they get to the viewer.

Miriamne is in a private collection and is currently hanging in the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The photo taken at the Groningen Museum in 2009 is for educational purposes only, copyright of the image rests with the private collection.

Reflective items such as the sloping marble next to the stair and the dress of Miriamne are close to equally reflective as they are the same distance from the viewer. The reflective surfaces of the steps become progressively brighter as they come closer to the viewer.

Behind Miriamne the reflective surfaces rapidly become darker. A good example is the half moon on the executioner’s neck chain; it is clearly a bright reflective surface but is much darker than the foreground items of the same reflective quality. Accordingly the darkest areas in the foreground are lighter than those in the back ground. The darkest shadow in the foreground is next to the belt clasp.

This completes our discussion of the overall painting for now. Lets look at the belt clasp and how it is painted. As I have no information on the paint pigments that Waterhouse used in Miriamne I will be discussing the image in terms of colour bias. This will enable us to look at the purpose of the colouring, how it contributes to the piece of the image and how it integrates with the image as a whole.

Firstly we should consider the buckle covers and how Waterhouse has broken them up to bring them into harmony with the image. One of the most important features of every Waterhouse painting is the way in which he ensured that elements of the painting did not dominate despite their powerful shape. We will consider the three circular elements of the buckle separately.

The first circle is the left side buckle cover. It is almost face on to the viewer and being a circle it would tend to attract visual attention, especially as it is surrounded by a second circle. To break this natural attention point Waterhouse has broken the edge of the circle with several highlights of light colour, then carried the strong reflection in the upper left quarter of the circle across the edge of the circle and on the upper right he has placed a shadow that breaks the circle by both crossing it with a line and a darkening of tone. Finally in the lower half he has carried the belt across the lower edge and in the upper half he has brought Miriamnes garment over the top edge of the circle to break the circle yet again. In all the circle is broken ten times to weaken it’s visual impact.

The central circle is the small buckle that is hidden in the depth of shadow between the two decorative circles. The buckle is inferred by splodges of green and mud grey paint, over a shadow dark background. The general darkness of this element compared to what is around it and the apparently rough inference are enough to reduce its visual importance to being almost negligible.

The third circle is the right side buckle cover. It is faced partly away from the viewer giving it less visual strength than the left side buckle cover. This element is broken up by having one side in shadow, which is also handled in a summary way as per the central buckle. It also has a reflection from the outer band breaking the circle as well as a green stone crossing the circle. Though given less breaks this circle is able to be as unobtrusive as the left side, due to its less confronting visual shape and greater degree of shadow area.

The metal of the clasp at first look may be interpreted as a succession of greys. It is doubtful that there is any black in this painting at all, including in the clasp, so the greys are more appropriately regarded as greyish mud colours. The trend in the clasp is to have a colour bias across this greyish mud from dull brown orange to dull violet. Remember these are biases and I’m not referring to direct brown orange or dull violet.

It is possible that to start the decorative pieces of the buckle were painted a dull violet that was quite dark. The dark shadow colour on the outer circle of the left side would seem the best colour. This was done while the shadow colour of the belt was still a little wet, which I gather from the apparent blending of colours at his point.

Following this the shadow from the material folds was painted in. This follows the apparent method of progressing from dark to light. It was common practice to work from dark to light at this time and in most atelier training this continues to be the practice.

Immediately after this the inner circle of the left buckle cover was painted and rendered. In this instance the dark shadow colour had white added to it and an emphasis of the belt colour as well. Given the way that the darkness level is consistent at the outside of this circle and progressively increments to paler it is likely that it was painted as a succession of colour bands that were then integrated not only by a fan bush style blending but also by the addition to some areas of more belt colour and dark shadow colour to give the appearance of reflections that add to the sense of shape. This approach is not so noticeable in the brush work on the left side circle but on the right where the handling is more cursory the bands and dappling can be identified visually.

Next step is the green stones. These are painted into either reserved areas or the grey areas of the disc were allowed to dry first. It would appear that the outer ring of stones was painted at the same time as the ring itself as they are ill defined and display areas left around them not touching the grey ring.

The central stone in both decorative circles is a combination of blue and green paint. The colour of the blue is used in both the stone and the reflections on the circle. Noticeably this indicated Waterhouse’s understanding of shadow and reflections. The reflection of the stone in a lightly shaded area is the blue colour from the stone while outside in the shadow in the light it is far paler.

The blue also is used to infer shape in the green stone. It is used at the points of light highlighting the depth of the transparent stone.

Highlighting is applied after the remainder of the shape and shadow of the objects are complete. This enables the item to be suppressed visually by carrying the colour of the dress across the surface of these objects. By doing this the eye is less attracted to them as they are a break but not completely different from what is around them.

The central stone of the left buckle cover has a whitish line across it that indicates a reflection of direct light from a fault in the stone. This is not visible from about three meters but the eye lessens the impact of the stone as a result of the imperfection.

Perhaps the most difficult element of the highlighting to understand is the near white wave of light that reflects from the left side circle. Not only is it the brightest item in the painting but it is further pushed forward by the dark (burnt umber or similar) back painting and the loose painting of a thin broken line through it. My theory on this is that this sharpness of definition is part of the overall effect of movement towards the viewer that Waterhouse seems to be attempting. As a secondary intent it further suppresses the belt buckle as a visual element by distracting from the circular shape and the colour contrasts in the Belt Buckle. This, what looks like an error, is a trick that tells the eye something is wrong but it is so small in the context of the painting that it is not consciously identifiable. Waterhouse is working with our perception not our visual observation when doing this.

There are several points in the full image that create a sense of dislocation, as though the image was a slightly blurred single frame in a movie. The highlight as already mentioned unsettles the observer’s view, which is reinforced by a loosely handled segment at the point where the dress meets the step on the right side. The shoe that projects from the dress is painted to infer it is in motion by varying levels of definition within the same surface. Unfortunately this is lost on the modern observer who is so used to seeing moving pictures and poorly focussed photos that such subtlety is unobserved without long periods of analysis. In its day this effect would have been extremely impressive and in many fields today such attention to detail would be highly commendable, unfortunately we as a culture have lost the capacity to really appreciate art of such intensely concentrated complexity.

author: Neil Miley