Consulting the Oracle

Consulting the Oracle is an oil painting on canvas by John William Waterhouse, dated 1884, in the collection of Tate, London, to which Sir Henry Tate presented it in 1894.

The scene is an imagined Eastern temple. Seven young women sit in a semicircle on rugs and a curved marble floor, waiting anxiously while a priestess, leaning toward a lamp-lit shrine fixed to the wall at the left, signals them to be silent so she can make out the words of the oracle. When the picture was first shown at the Royal Academy in 1884 it was accompanied by an explanation: the oracle, or teraphim, was a human head preserved with spices and fixed to a wall, before which lamps were lit, until the imaginations of those consulting it were so excited that they seemed to hear a low voice speaking of things to come. The exotic setting owes more to Orientalist painters such as John Frederick Lewis than to first-hand experience.

The Illustrated London News described the canvas as one of the principal works of the year. Waterhouse's biographer Anthony Hobson called it a keyhole composition, meaning that a partial ring of figures directs all its attention onto a single other figure, the priestess. For Hobson the work helped establish Waterhouse as a classical painter: the arched windows, the semicircular floor and the broad marble step set up verticals, horizontals and a circle, while the angled rugs and the inclined body of the priestess add a deliberate diagonal tension.

The painting measures 119.4 by 198.1 cm. Magic and prophecy were recurring themes for Waterhouse, and the picture has been compared with The Magic Circle of 1886. It was bought by Sir Henry Tate and was among the works he gave to the nation in 1894.