John William Waterhouse was a British painter and that embraced the legacy of the Pre-Raphaelites John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Like those artists, Waterhouse painted beautiful women in settings derived from literature and mythology, as seen in his The Lady of Shalott (1888) and A Mermaid (1900). Born on April 6, 1849 in Rome, Italy to English painters, his family moved back to London in 1854. Waterhouse enrolled at the Royal Academy of Art as a young man, and though he initially studied sculpture, by 1874 he had devoted himself entirely to painting. In the second half of the 1880’s, the artist's work was enhanced by the oil studies he made during plein-air painting expeditions in the English countryside and Italy. ...