John William Waterhouse was born in Rome to British parents in 1849. He lived there for the first six years of his life, and the exposure to Classical Italian heritage would have a profound effect on his work. In 1870 Waterhouse was admitted as a probationer in the Sculpture School, and around 1885 he was finally elected as an Associate of the Royal Academy. In 1888 he exhibited a painting at the Academy, which was to become his most famous masterpiece "The Lady of Shalott", a work only lightly praised by the critics of the time.
Waterhouse was known as a masterful storyteller with an instinctive gift for suspending the listener at the most striking moment of a narrative. His work consists mainly of waif like beauties, many of the figures born of his own fertile imagination. Little is known of Waterhouse's private life or artistic beliefs.
