The Banned Masterpiece Manchester tried to Hide: Hylas and the Nymphs (Waterhouse)

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:02]Imagine [music] you walk into a gallery in Manchester. An ordinary morning of the 20th [music] or 21st century, it doesn't matter which. And suddenly, amid walls [music] laden with gilded frames, something stops you. You can't quite say [music] what. Perhaps the deep green of the water, perhaps the whiteness [music] of those figures that seem to emit their own light from beneath the surface. Or perhaps the gaze of [music] that young man who isn't looking at you, but at them, wearing an expression that contains everything at once. Desire, fascination, [music] and the premonition that something irreversible is about to happen. That painting [music] is called Hylas and the Nymphs. John William Waterhouse painted it in 1896, and today, more [music] than a century later, it continues to generate conversations that reach far beyond painting itself. Conversations about desire [music] and power, about what we choose to show and what we decide to silence, about the gaze and to whom it belongs. Today, on Chronicles [music] of the Brush, we wade into those dark waters. And I promise you, when you surface [music] on the other side, you will never see this painting in quite the same way again.

[00:01:14]To understand the painting, we must first understand [music] the myth. And the myth of Hylas is, at its heart, a story about beauty as destiny. [music] Hylas was a young prince, son of King Theiodamas of the Dryopes. He was neither warrior nor [music] strategist, nor a hero in the classical sense. He was, quite [music] simply, beautiful.

[00:01:37]And that beauty made him the companion and lover, according to some sources, of the greatest of all [music] Greek heroes, Hercules. Hercules, who had subdued lions and toppled [music] columns, was undone by the eyes of this boy. Together, they sailed aboard the Argo, Jason's legendary vessel, on that colossal expedition toward Colchis to claim the Golden Fleece.

[00:01:59]>> [music] >> Picture it. The most famous ship of antiquity, laden with demigods and heroes, cutting through the Aegean toward the unknown. And among them all, Hylas, with no special talent save the ability to exist with a grace that disarmed everyone who looked at him. The stop in Mysia changed everything. The Argonauts anchored to take on fresh water.

[00:02:22]>> [music] >> Hercules sent Hylas to fetch it. The young man wandered from the group, [music] pitcher in hand, and arrived at the spring of Dryope, a shadowed pool covered in water lilies, where the water was so still [music] it looked like a dark mirror. The nymphs saw him arrive, and they fell in [music] love. What happened next depends on who tells the story. Theocritus, in his idyll the 13th, [music] describes the nymphs comforting Hylas as he weeps for the mortal world [music] he has left behind. Apollonius of Rhodes suggests a single naiad [music] took him as her husband beneath the waters. And Ovid, always more [music] dramatic, also points to a single nymph as the author of the abduction.

[00:03:03]>> [music] >> But Waterhouse chose not one. He chose seven. The same number of sirens that surround Ulysses' [music] ship in another of his great works. Because Waterhouse understood something the Greek poets may have overlooked. [music] That seduction, when truly powerful, does not have a single face. It has [music] many, all alike, all different.

[00:03:26]Hercules searched for Hylas desperately.

[00:03:28]He called out along the shoreline until his voice became an echo [music] among the trees. The Argo sailed without him, and Hylas remained forever in [music] the depths, immortal and vanished, transformed into the most beautiful absence in all of Greek mythology. Now we must speak of [music] the man who chose to paint that moment. That precise instant when Hylas is still on the shore, still capable of turning back, [music] but won't. John William Waterhouse was born in Rome in 1849.

[00:03:58][music] The son of English painters living in Italy copying Renaissance [music] masters for tourists, he grew up among classical marble and the ruins of the empire. His family affectionately [music] called him Nino. And that boy who as a child insisted to his schoolmates that Roman soldiers would have won any [music] battle grew up to become one of the most beloved painters of the Victorian age. [music] He arrived in London in 1854, trained at the Royal Academy of Art from 1871, and here is a curious detail.

[00:04:29]>> [music] >> Before turning to painting, he studied sculpture. That seemingly minor fact [music] explains everything. In his canvases, bodies are not flat. They are tangible. They have weight, [music] volume, the solidity of stone transformed into flesh. Waterhouse [music] painted as if he were carving.

[00:04:49]His style is a fascinating crossroads.

[00:04:52]He was [music] not exactly Pre-Raphaelite, though the Pre-Raphaelites claimed him as one of their own. He was not exactly realist, though the French realists acknowledged [music] his square brushstroke and his almost obsessive attention to nature. He was, [music] in the words of critic A.R.

[00:05:08]Baldry, "a man who did not turn his back on the spirit of his age, but inhabited [music] it with an intellectual modernity that few of his contemporaries were able to perceive." What he painted were women. Always women. Witches [music] and saints, tragic ladies and powerful enchantresses. The Waterhouse girl, pale [music] skin, pink cheeks, auburn hair, is an ideal of beauty we recognize instantly. [music] But after 1890, something changed.

[00:05:36]Waterhouse [music] began also to paint beautiful young men. Hylas, Narcissus, Adonis. Beautiful and passive youths, [music] incapable of resisting the desire they awakened. Young men who lost to women not through cowardice, but through an excess of beauty. [music] It was, without anyone saying so aloud, a radical subversion of the Victorian ideal of masculinity. Let us pause now on the painting itself. Because this oil measuring 98 by 163 cm, painted in 1896 and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1897, is a work of extraordinary visual complexity that reveals itself only to those who allow themselves to look at it slowly. The viewpoint is everything.

[00:06:23]Waterhouse [music] places the spectator almost at water level, at the height of the nymphs.

[00:06:28]>> [music] >> We are not standing on the bank watching the scene from outside. We are inside.

[00:06:34]We are in the pool. [music] That compositional choice is not innocent. It makes us accomplices in the seduction, [music] not witnesses. Hylas leans over the bank, dressed in a blue tunic [music] and a red sash. He carries a pitcher in his left hand.

[00:06:50]>> [clears throat] >> His face [music] is in profile, but his eyes meet those of one of the nymphs. A 20th century critic described him with a phrase I have never forgotten. He has the [music] face and haircut of an Edwardian university student. He is not a Greek hero. He is any young man. He is every young man. And that, of course, is [music] precisely the point. The seven nymphs emerge from the water wreathed in water lilies. Waterhouse [music] painted them using only two models, which creates that unsettling effect of [music] hypnotic multiplication. They are all alike and all different, as though desire were a single creature that had fractured itself into seven bodies. One holds [music] his wrist.

[00:07:32]Another pulls at his tunic. A third holds [music] out pearls in her open palm, with that expression described as fatal yet reluctant and regretful of someone offering something they know will destroy. The floral [music] symbolism is a language unto itself.

[00:07:48]Water lilies signify [music] innocence and purity, but also mark the threshold between the terrestrial and aquatic worlds. Poppies in the nymphs' hair presage sleep, dreams, and death.

[00:08:00]Narcissus flowers [music] speak of desire. Pearls represent virginity.

[00:08:06]Waterhouse does not paint flowers at random. He composes a visual poem [music] that his contemporaries, educated in the language of flowers, read with perfect fluency. And then there is the water. That silken and foul-bottomed surface, [music] in the words of historian Richard Jenkins, where bodies are reflected and where, beneath the apparent [music] transparency, shapes like outstretched hands can be made out. The water [music] is not a backdrop. It is the threshold.

[00:08:34]The place where one world ends and another begins. [music] Hylas already has his right hand submerged. Without knowing it, he has already crossed the border. [music] And here comes the question that transforms this painting into something more than a mythological [music] illustration. When we look at Hylas and the Nymphs, who possesses the gaze? For decades, the [music] answer seemed obvious. The male spectator. The nymphs have their skin exposed, their breasts uncovered, their eyes turned away from the viewer.

[00:09:05]>> [music] >> They are available to be contemplated without being able to look back at us.

[00:09:10]This, precisely this, [music] is what Laura Mulvey in 1975 called the male gaze. The visual structure that turns women into objects [music] of contemplation and men into the subjects who observe. But there is another reading.

[00:09:24]>> [music] >> One that criticism took decades to articulate. In this painting, [music] seven women surround a beautiful young man. It is they who take the initiative.

[00:09:34][music] It is they who desire him, who touch him, who decide his fate. The body of Hylas, young, vulnerable, passive, is the object of the nymphs' contemplation, [music] not the spectators'. And when scholar Jennifer Bates Elant [music] studied the painting, she reached a brilliant conclusion. Waterhouse, without announcing it, was painting [music] the female gaze. The desire of the woman who observes the male body as a subject of beauty, longing, and power. This, in 1896, at the height of the Victorian era, was a subversion almost imperceptible. Too subtle to scandalize, too profound to ignore. Waterhouse created what scholars call the Waterhouse boy, that masculine ideal of melancholy beauty, dark and seductive, who does not [music] fight or conquer, but simply exists and, for that very reason, is consumed. It was a silent [music] response to the changes shaking Victorian society. Women were beginning to claim public space, to study, to vote [music] in some places. The figure of the ineffectual, beautiful, undefeated [music] man was the dark reverse of masculine anxiety in the face of that displacement. [music] The painting, seen this way, is not innocent. It never was.

[00:10:51]January 2018.

[00:10:54]The Manchester [music] Art Gallery, where Hylas and the Nymphs has hung for decades in a room titled, [music] without any irony whatsoever, In Pursuit of Beauty. Artist Sonia [music] Boyce has spent months speaking with museum staff, curators, guards, volunteers, cleaners.

[00:11:10]>> [music] >> Many of the women she speaks with express a discomfort they have never put into words. In this gallery, women [music] exist only as decorative objects or as forces of evil. Femme fatale [music] or figures of passive contemplation. Never agents of their own story. And then something unprecedented happens. The [music] painting is taken down from the wall. In its place, a card with questions. Blank space for visitors [music] to affix sticky notes with their opinions. And for one night, drag artists [music] and queer performers act in the 19th century galleries, provoking that same mixture of discomfort and delight that Boyce [music] considered necessary. The painting was away for one week. Just one week. [music] But the reaction was ferocious enough to surprise everyone. Social media ignited.

[00:12:01]An Oxford professor [music] warned in The Guardian that this was what the Nazis had done with art that conflicted [music] with their political ends.

[00:12:09]Critic Jonathan Jones called it the victory of Puritanism [music] over sexual liberation. Messages arrived at the museum speaking of extreme feminism, book burning, [music] censorship. The greatest irony, and this is what Boyce herself pointed out, is that her intention was never to [music] erase the painting, but to make visible something that habitually remains hidden, the power of museums to decide what we see, in what context, and with what [music] label. Every week, hundreds of works are moved, stored, or temporarily removed in galleries [music] across the world.

[00:12:43]Nobody protests. But when the decision is explicit, when it is [music] named, when it becomes an act of public reflection, the symbolic order feels [music] threatened. The painting was reinstalled after 7 days. And the video work Boyce created from [music] the material of that evening, Six Acts, became part of her retrospective [music] at the same Manchester Art Gallery. The controversy had ultimately generated [music] exactly what it sought. A painting seen thousands of times without much thought had suddenly become the subject of national conversation.

[00:13:15][music] There is something I find extraordinary about this story. Waterhouse painted [music] Hylas at the precise instant before the disappearance. Not the abduction. [music] Not the depths. The threshold. The moment when two worlds [music] still exist and the possibility of choosing still remains, though in reality it no longer does. And that, I believe, is what makes the painting endure. Not the technical beauty, which is [music] beyond doubt. Not the mythology, which anyone can read in a book. But that specific tension, [music] that suspended instant between what one is and what one is about to become. We have all stood on that bank at some point in our lives.

[00:13:58]Waterhouse died in 1917, having never explained his paintings at any great length. He was known for his reserve, for his almost invisible private life, for letting his work speak for themselves. And speak they did. What he could not have imagined is that a century later, his painting would still be dividing conference halls, generating doctoral dissertations, [music] igniting debates on social media, and prompting a contemporary artist to remove it from a wall in order to force people [music] to ask why they missed it. That, ultimately, is the measure of a masterpiece. Not that everyone admires [music] it, but that no one can ignore it. Hylas and the Nymphs still hangs in Manchester. And the Nymphs [music] continue to gaze with those eyes of sinister calm that Rose Sketchley described over a hundred years ago, cold and strange eyes of desire. And Hylas [music] continues to lean over the water, on the verge of losing the world he knows. And we continue to look. And they still [music] cannot agree on what we see. That is all for today on Chronicles of the Brush. If this episode has stirred something in you, you know what to do. And if you know [music] someone who has never heard of Waterhouse, now you have a story to tell them. Until next time.