Hylas and the Nymphs

The story is an old one. Hylas, a companion of the hero Heracles on the voyage of the Argonauts, goes to a pool to fetch water and the nymphs living in it pull him under, and he is never seen again. Waterhouse painted it in 1896, near the end of the Victorian taste for these dreamy classical scenes, and gave all seven nymphs the same pale face rising out of the dark water among the lily pads. For more than a century it hung quietly in Manchester. Then in early 2018 the gallery took it off the wall for a week, framing the removal as a prompt for debate about how such paintings show women. The reaction was loud enough that it was back up within days. That episode is now part of how people encounter it. The nymph reaching for his wrist has water pearled on her skin, painted with the same care Waterhouse gave the flowers around her.