Most Waterhouse paintings come with a title, a date, an exhibition record and a trail of owners. This one does not. It circulates under the name St. Joan, and it is held in a private collection, but beyond that the story gets thin. We could not trace it to a dated exhibition or a catalogue entry, and the sources that do give a date disagree by about forty years.
What the painting shows
A young person with long, loose auburn hair looks upward against a nearly black background. One shoulder and the chest are bare, and a pale blue cloth falls over the other shoulder. An arrow passes through the upper arm on the left of the picture. A long, bent reed crosses the body diagonally, one reed is broken, and a cattail stands at the left edge. The eyes are wet and lifted, and the expression is calm rather than pained.
The identity puzzle
The title says Joan of Arc, and image archives such as Wikimedia Commons list the sitter as Joan of Arc with an unknown date. But Joan is almost always painted in armour, with a banner or a sword. Here there is no armour at all. What the picture has instead is an arrow, a bare torso and a dark ground, which is the visual shorthand of Saint Sebastian. That makes the identity genuinely open: a Joan shown at the moment she was wounded, a Sebastian, or a symbolic martyr figure that Waterhouse never meant to name.
There is real history behind the arrow idea for Joan. At the siege of Orléans in May 1429 she was struck by an arrow near the shoulder, went back into the fighting after it was dressed, and the French broke the siege the next day. If the painting is Joan, the reeds and the arrow could be read as that wound.
A title that may be later than the painting
Joan of Arc was beatified in 1909 and canonised only in 1920. Waterhouse died in 1917. A title beginning "St." would have been unusual in his lifetime, which suggests the name may have been attached later, by a dealer or a cataloguer. That is an inference, not a documented fact, but it fits the missing paper trail.
Little-known facts
- Waterhouse did paint martyrs: his Saint Eulalia of 1885 (Tate, London) shows the child saint dead in the snow, with a dove leaving her mouth.
- Online listings give this picture dates ranging from the early 1870s to 1913. We have not found a source with documentation for either.
- We sell it under the traditional title, St. Joan, because that is the name it has travelled under. If you know more about it, we would like to hear.
St. Joan appears on our: