Pandora

Pandora is an oil painting on canvas by John William Waterhouse, painted around 1896 and now in a private collection; it measures 152 by 91 cm.

In Greek myth, as told by Hesiod in the Works and Days and the Theogony, Pandora was the first woman, fashioned by Hephaestus and Athena at the command of Zeus as a punishment for mankind after Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. She opened a vessel she had been given and released the evils of human life, among them old age, sickness and poverty; only Hope stayed behind. Hesiod speaks of a jar, but by the nineteenth century painters had turned it into a box. Howard Oakley suggests two possible causes, a mistranslation by Erasmus in 1508 and confusion with the box carried by Psyche, and dates the switch in painting to between about 1834 and 1860.

Waterhouse chose the moment just before disaster. In a dark forest beside a stream and a small waterfall, Pandora kneels on the rocks in a deep blue gown that has slipped from her shoulder and lifts the lid of a large gilded chest, decorated with relief ornament, that stands on a block of stone. She peers inside as the first wisps escape, apparently unaware of what she is letting loose. Commentators have noted that Waterhouse makes the young woman, rather than the box, the centre of the picture, and that the enclosing trees keep attention on her.

The subject had been painted by other artists in the preceding decades, notably Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1871 and Jules Lefebvre in 1872. Oakley describes Waterhouse's version as one of his lesser-known paintings but a major and unusually complete treatment of the myth.