Sweet Nothings

John William Godward was an English painter from the end of the Pre-Raphaelite / Neo-Classicist era. He was a protégé of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema but his style of painting fell out of favor with the arrival of painters like Picasso. He committed suicide at the age of 61 and is said to have written in his suicide note that "the world was not big enough" for him and a Picasso. His already estranged family, who had disapproved of him becoming an artist, was ashamed of his suicide and burned his papers. No photographs of Godward are known to survive. The vast majority of Godward's extant images feature women in Classical dress, posed against these landscape features, though there are some semi-nude and fully nude figures included in his oeuvre. The titles reflect Godward's source of inspiration: Classical Civilization, most notably that of Ancient Rome, and Ancient Greece.