Waterhouse is only associated with the Pre-Raphaelite painters. His early paintings were influenced by Victorian neo-classicism as practiced by Alma-Tadema, Leighton and Poynter. Later, he came under the spell of the second phase of Pre-Raphaelitism, led by Burne-Jones. By the mid-1880s, he was interested in French plein-air painting; a la Jules Bastien-Lepage. By the early 1890s, Waterhouse had fused all of these influences into his own style: ‘He painted pre-Raphaelite pictures in a more modern manner. He was, in fact, a kind of academic Burne-Jones, like him in his types and his moods, but with less insistence on design and more on atmosphere.
