Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Hylas.
The gallery
Hylas and the Nymphs
John William Waterhouse, 1896
Waterhouse's Manchester canvas is the modern image of Hylas: the Argonaut youth kneels at a dark pool while seven water-nymphs rise to draw him under. Painted in 1896 for the Pre-Raphaelite twilight of Victorian myth, it freezes Theocritus' Mysian spring — beauty as a trap, Heracles' beloved vanishing into water. The painting remains the single most familiar depiction of the abduction that left the Argo without its strongest hero.
Hylas and the Water Nymphs
Bertel Thorvaldsen, 1831
Thorvaldsen's neoclassical marble relief (Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen) turns the rape of Hylas into a cool frieze of grasping nymphs and a yielding youth. Where Waterhouse would later drown the scene in foliage and pond-light, the Danish sculptor keeps the myth as pure outline — the Argonaut cupbearer pulled from the shore by desire. It is the academic afterlife of Apollonius' Mysian episode, carved for a Europe that read Hylas as both beauty and loss.
Hylas Carried Off by Nymphs
Henry Howard, c. 1800–1840
Henry Howard's British Romantic canvas stages the moment the naiads lift Hylas from the spring — limbs entangled, pitcher forgotten, the Argonaut already halfway into another world. The painting belongs to the same nineteenth-century fascination with Theocritus' Idyll XIII that later fed Waterhouse: Hylas as the beautiful youth whom water and love erase from the Argo's crew.