![John William Waterhouse - Fair Rosamund [1916]](http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8816/16936152927_6a1aa530a6_o.jpg)
Like many of the early Pre-Raphaelites who came before him, John William Waterhouse found inspiration in the romantic narratives of the Middle-Ages. While based loosely on verifiable facts, the legend of Rosamund and Queen Eleanor is likely as much of a fairy tale as it is an accurate account, but nonetheless its violence and eroticism provided a compelling subject for many Victorian painters including Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Frederick Sandys and Arthur Hughes, as well as writers Alfred Tennyson and Algernon Charles Swinburne.
[Sold for $1,505,000 at Sotheby’s, New York - Oil on canvas, 96.5 x 72.3 cm]