#frederick fry

Juliet (1898), by J.W. Waterhouse

This lovely portrait of Shakespeare’s Juliet in a Venetian setting with a canal and a bridge in the background is also known as The Blue Necklace.  Like so many of the Early Renaissance Italian painters, Waterhouse shows the girl in a perfect profile to display her exceptional beauty.

The painting always resided in private collections of which Sir Frederick Morris Fry, a member of the Council of the City and Guilds of the London Technical Institute and master of the notable Merchant Taylors’ School, was the first.  During his life he gathered a collection of at least five paintings by Waterhouse.