Who painted the 1896 artwork titled Pandora?

John William Waterhouse painted the 1896 artwork titled Pandora. The oil painting depicts the mythological figure beside the container whose opening brings suffering into the human world.

Waterhouse was an English painter associated with the Pre-Raphaelite tradition and with late Victorian academic art. His works frequently draw on mythology, literature, and tragic female figures, making Pandora a natural subject for his visual style.

The painting shows Pandora seated outdoors beside a large vessel. Its composition focuses on the moment before or during the opening of the container, rather than illustrating every event in Hesiod’s narrative. This is an artistic interpretation, not a literal surviving image from ancient Greece.

Waterhouse’s Pandora is sometimes confused with other nineteenth-century paintings of the same mythological character. Artists including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Lawrence Alma-Tadema also worked with classical or literary subjects, but the 1896 painting titled Pandora is by Waterhouse.