A Roman Offering is one of Waterhouse's smallest and slimmest pictures: an oil on canvas of about 50 by 20 cm, taller than it is wide by a ratio of nearly two and a half to one. Sources date it to about 1890 or 1891, and it is in a private collection. Christie's describes it as a small variant of The Shrine, the larger painting he showed at the New Gallery in 1895, so it reads as a kind of working idea for that later picture.
A girl at a household shrine
A young woman in a pale gown with a gold sash stands in profile in a sunlit garden, her face turned to a wall niche. In the crook of one arm she carries a thick bunch of white flowers, and with her free hand she is arranging deep blue ones in a terracotta jug on the ledge. In the niche, half in shadow, is a small dark statuette. A bronze bowl sits on the pavement at the lower left, a flight of stone steps climbs on the right, and olive-like trees fill the background. The pink wall carries a band of painted ornament near the floor, in the manner of the Roman and Pompeian interiors that fascinated Victorian painters.
Why the tall, narrow shape
The format is the point. Waterhouse fits the whole scene, from the arch of the niche down to the offering bowl, into a single vertical strip, so the eye travels from the statuette to the girl's hand to her bare feet.
Little-known facts
- Waterhouse was born in Rome in 1849, so the Italian light and the idea of daily household devotion were part of his childhood landscape.
- A second painting, Arranging Flowers (also c.1890), has a very similar composition, and the two are easy to mix up. Auction listings sometimes blur them, so check the title when you read a provenance.
- The larger The Shrine is a different, much bigger canvas; the small version here is the variant, not a copy of it.
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