This beautiful study was painted about 1895, the year Waterhouse exhibited Saint Cecilia at the Royal Academy. It is one of the artist‘s finest oil sketches of what Hobson termed une jeune fille fatale. It dates from the time of his greatest success, and shows the artist at his most assured and most romantic. Waterhouse did not sign it, and it does not directly relate to any finished painting, suggesting that it was not intended for exhibition. The girl looks a little like the rightmost figure in Hylas and the Nymphs of 1896, but Waterhouse appears to have chosen his beautiful, yearning models for their conformity to his singular romantic vision, rather than for their individual qualities.

None of Waterhouse‘s modern biographers has been able to tell us much about the artist’s character, what the man who painted the most popular Victorian pictures today was actually like. There is not much to go on, and he must either have been a very private man or really quite bland, which seems unlikely, considering his imaginative and romantic qualities. Waterhouse did not discuss ‘High Art’ in letters or diaries, but seems to have been open to cultural influences. Called ‘Nino’ by his friends, he was proud to have been born in Rome of British parents, both painters. Having mastered subjects from the ancient world and history earlier in his career, he began to abandon the laborious precision with which he painted them, and instead painted increasingly poetic and romantic subjects towards the 1890s, directly onto the canvas without preparatory drawing. 

With Anemones, Waterhouse has succeeded with both the boldness of a painter used to drawing quickly with the brush, and with the confidence not to spoil his work by over-finishing.

While Waterhouse finished the face in the centre, he employed looser treatment towards the edges, laying on the rich and sonorous colour with large square brushstrokes. Waterhouse‘s friend and neighbour William Logsdail, his brother- in-law Peregrine Feeney, and Frank Dicksee all painted ‘directly’ in this manner, inimical to the training of the Academy schools, but there is an impetuosity to Waterhouse‘s work missing from the work of other painters. His oil sketches have the sudden attack of a successful ambush with minimal forces, not the careful finish of a meticulously planned campaign.