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To confess a passion for Pre-Raphaelite painting in the art world these days is to reveal a love that dare not speak its name. Our generation has been trained to scorn these works as decorative, sentimental, retrograde. But they're due for a comeback.

There have been two streams to the story of modern art, after all. One is the much-revered tradition of abstraction, rooted (in Western art) in Paul Cézanne and finding its apotheosis in the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko's moody vapours. The other is the narrative tradition, taking root in the religious paintings of the early Italian Renaissance, threading its way onward through history painting and winding up in the art of the 19th-century French Salon and the British figurative art pieces of the Pre-Raphaelites, with their honeyed depictions of scenes from the classics, Shakespeare and Romantic poetry.

J.W. Waterhouse’s quintessential 1891 work Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses.

At the core of the Pre-Raphaelite movement stood Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and Holman Hunt, and, a generation later, their acolytes, including John William Waterhouse. Born in 1849, the same year the Pre-Raphaelites' “brotherhood” was announced, Waterhouse is the subject of a massive, exquisitely staged exploratory exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts this fall and winter.

The show's organizers – from the Museum of Fine Arts, the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands and London's Royal Academy of Arts – position Waterhouse's painting as a fusion of British and Continental art. (Favouring the same literary subject matter as his British compatriots, he wielded his brush like a Frenchman, and shared the fevered dreams of the Symbolists.) But the real news is how his thematic interests foreshadow what was to come – both in art and in life. Women were his obsession, and the show gives us the gamut of hardball heroines (his Cleopatra looks like she could take you in an arm-wrestle) and sweet-lipped, heavy-lidded victim types, such as the Lady of Shalott, whose gilded story, immortalized by Tennyson, exemplified the tragedy that ensues when female desire is unleashed. (She sees Lancelot reflected in her mirror and all hell breaks loose.)

Most striking to the contemporary eye, though, is Waterhouse's fascination with the powerful women of pagan antiquity, whom he imagines in a richly erotic way. His Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses (1891) is the classic case. Instead of recording the moment of Ulysses's seduction, Waterhouse rolls the story back a few frames to the moment when Circe bewitches him and his soldiers, whom she transforms into dozing swine with the wave of her wand. (We see one snuffling happily beside her foot.) Seated on her throne, she lifts her arm imperiously and casts her spell. Ulysses crouches in the mirror behind her, a bearded likeness of the artist himself, reaching to grapple with his sword in self-defence. (Paging Dr. Freud.) Both fearsome and erotically compelling, Circe commands the space around her with a hypnotically sensuous glance, her eyes brimming like the chalice she raises. Looking up from the lowly vantage point Waterhouse provides us, we, too, become her subjects.

The Waterhouse show is replete with such sorceresses and transgressive sirens, reflecting, obliquely, the trauma surrounding the changing role of women in the late 19th century. We're still working on this stuff. Waterhouse's femmes fatales haunt the contemporary DVD projections of Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist, whose art held sway in the atrium of New York's Museum of Modern Art last year – a feminist Eden complete with rooting hogs and tender-limbed naiads. Such florid imaginings, too, set the stage for American artist Matthew Barney's dreamy, erotic phantasms, where doves holding pink ribbons ceremonially acclaim the male member. In Canadian art, the sculpted and painted fantasies of Toronto artist Shary Boyle are, by turns, sweet-seeming and tinged with an eeriness worthy of Waterhouse and his ilk. More than a century after his forays at the Royal Academy, he haunts us still.

J.W. Waterhouse: Garden of Enchantment continues at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts until Feb. 7.