Hylas appears in the story of the Argonauts as a young companion of Hercules aboard the ship Argo. Sent ashore to draw water from a spring, he is drawn into the pool by the nymphs who inhabit it and disappears, leaving Hercules to search for him in vain before the Argo is forced to sail on without them both. The episode is a brief one within the larger Argonaut cycle, but it gave painters a self-contained, visually rich subject: a lone youth at the water's edge, the nymphs reaching up from beneath the surface.

In classical literature, nymphs were minor female deities associated with a particular feature of the natural world, a spring, a tree, a mountain or a meadow, and were imagined as beautiful, gentle and largely free of ordinary social constraint^[1]. Naiads, the specific class of nymph associated with rivers and streams, belong to this wider category, and while ancient sources describe nymphs generally as amorous and gentle in temperament, their freedom from human rules also made them figures capable of drawing mortal men toward danger, exactly the tension Waterhouse's painting stages between the nymphs' inviting beauty and Hylas's fate^[1].

Hylas and the Nymphs belongs to the same group of classical and literary subjects Waterhouse returned to across his career, women drawn from myth and legend who combine beauty with an undertone of danger or loss. He trained and exhibited chiefly at the Royal Academy in London, and much of his large-scale mythological work, painted through the 1880s and beyond, found its way into British regional collections such as Manchester Art Gallery rather than the national collections in London, a pattern shared by several of his best-known canvases.