Flower-Kings: Images of Renewal and Death in John William Waterhouse’s Male Figures

John William Waterhouse often sets his paintings in forests, deep with foliage, flowers, and lush vegetation to portray a dream-like world that encourages fantasy and reflection. Waterhouse’s artwork contains a reverence for things unseen. The seasons, with their cycles of death and renewal, weave a thread throughout his canon. This is evident in his works The Awakening of Adonis, Hylas and the Nymphs, and Echo and Narcissus, three Flower-Kings who, like early spring blossoms, have a short-lived beauty that is as lovely as it is tragic.

The term “Flower-King is directly related to Germaine Greer’s work in Beautiful Boy, where she calls Narcissus a “spring-flower hero” (197) and Adonis “the ultimate flower-hero” (198). This essay carries that theme to Waterhouse’s paintings, who positioned these doomed males surrounded by nymphs and goddesses, and flowers, enhancing their relationship to flowers and nature. These seemingly innocent paintings tell the same story of young women enjoying the short-lived pleasure of these Flower-Kings; picking them at the height of their beauty, in verdant landscapes that remind us of the renewal of life. In Waterhouse’s lush landscapes young men are as fragile as spring blossoms and wither under the female gaze of desire. The Flower-Kings never last, but they do return.