Ovid's account in the Metamorphoses gives the fullest ancient version of the story. The nymph Echo, already cursed by Juno to lose the power of speaking her own words after using chatter to cover for Jupiter's infidelities, encounters Narcissus in the forest and falls in love with him, able only to repeat the last words he speaks^[2]. When Narcissus rejects her, along with others who love him, a scorned admirer prays to the goddess Nemesis that he might one day love without ever being able to possess the object of his love; Nemesis grants the prayer, and Narcissus is later drawn to a still, silvery pool where he falls hopelessly for his own reflection^[1]. Ovid encourages sympathy for Echo throughout, presenting her as doing everything within her limited power to express a love she cannot otherwise voice^[2].

Waterhouse was far from the first major painter drawn to this myth. Nicolas Poussin had painted his own version of Echo and Narcissus in seventeenth-century France, developing an image of Echo's dissolution, in some accounts showing her disappearing into the very rock she leans against, an idea scholars have traced partly to earlier poetic retellings of Ovid rather than to the Metamorphoses alone^[2]. The subject's long popularity in French painting fed into a wider tradition that British artists of Waterhouse's generation, working from classical literary sources, continued to draw on well into the Victorian period.

Echo and Narcissus sits within the same body of work as Waterhouse's other classical subjects. He trained and exhibited chiefly through the Royal Academy in London, and across his career several of his large mythological canvases, this one among them, ended up in British regional galleries such as the Walker Art Gallery rather than in the national collections in London. Waterhouse moved between subjects from Homer, Ovid, Arthurian legend and Tennyson throughout his working life rather than settling on one recurring theme, and Echo and Narcissus, with its interest in unrequited love, self-absorption and loss, sits comfortably alongside his other paintings of women shaped by longing, rejection or transformation.