Who painted the 1896 oil painting titled Pandora, showing the mythological woman beside her container?

John William Waterhouse painted the 1896 oil painting Pandora. The work presents the mythological woman beside the vessel associated with the release of troubles into the world, combining a classical subject with Waterhouse’s characteristic late-Victorian figurative style.

Waterhouse was an English painter associated with Pre-Raphaelite and academic traditions. He repeatedly drew on mythology, literature, and legendary women for subject matter. His Pandora is often discussed alongside his paintings of figures such as Ophelia, Circe, and the Lady of Shalott.

The painting is sometimes confused with Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s separate work Pandora, painted in 1869. Both artists treated the same mythological figure, but they produced different works in different decades. Waterhouse’s painting is the 1896 image, while Rossetti’s earlier version belongs to the Pre-Raphaelite artist’s broader interest in symbolic female figures.