ABSTRACT
It is easy to look at J. W. Waterhouse’s painting Hylas and the Nymphs (Figure 2) and to ridicule the way in which he sets his classical scene in a shaded lily pond somewhere in the south of England, but it is far more dicult to evoke the natural environment of ancient Greece successfully in a single image. ere is a good reason for that: for all that Greece is a small country, it is immensely various, encompassing a whole range of environmental conditions, from desert to permanent snow, and oering highly contrasting conditions at very short distances from each other.
