John William Waterhouse R.A., R.I.

Thomas Agnew & Sons, Ltd., London, February 14, 1901 (sold for the artist)

J. Gresham (purchased from the above)

Sale, Christie's, London, July 12, 1917, lot 132

Gooden & Fox, London (purchased from the above)

Lord Leverhulme

Sale, Christie's, June 6, 1958, lot 167

M. Goldschmidt (purchased from the above)

M. Bertonati

Sale, Sotheby's, London, November 26, 1985, lot 55, illustrated

Purchased from the above

Milan, Galleria del Levante, Simbolismo & Art Nouveau, 1969, no. 17, illustrated

Baden-Baden, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Präraffaeliten, November 23 - February 24, 1974, no. 186, p. 299, illustrated

Anthony Hobson, The Art and Life of J W Waterhouse, RA, New York, Rizzoli, 1980, no. 134, pl. 108, pp. 117, 188

Anthony Hobson, J W Waterhouse, London, Phaidon, 1989, pp. 78-80, pl. 56

Peter Trippi, J. W. Waterhouse, London, Phaidon, 2002, pp. 123, 226, no. 93, illustrated

From Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "The Orchard Pit" 1869

Oh, happy seafarers are ye
And surely all your ills are past,
And toil upon the land and sea,
Since ye are brought to us at last;
But now, but now, when ye have lain
Asleep with us a little while
Beneath the washing of the main,
How calm shall be your waking smile!

From William Morris, “Life and Death of Jason” 1867

In 1900, Waterhouse completed A Mermaid (see fig.1), his Diploma Work for the Royal Academy, which he donated to the institution in 1901. By the end of that year, he had completed The Siren, a work which displays Waterhouse’s continued interest in mythic themes with a shared dialogue between sex, death and music (see Trippi, p. 123).

Waterhouse first painted the mythological siren in his 1891 Ulysses and the Sirens (National Gallery of Victoria), a work whose composition most likely was inspired by a Greek vase in the British Museum.  The painting differs greatly from The Siren in scale, composition and atmosphere and reflects Waterhouse’s mature shift to an increasingly intimate psychology and scale.  Waterhouse’s obituary in The Times (February 12, 1917) described him as ‘a kind of academic Burne-Jones …with less insistence on design and more on atmosphere,’ a phrase that described this progression.  Rather than painting a grandiose epic scene from Homer, the Siren offers a moment, the deeply personal gaze of a deadly encounter.  The key to this emotional heightening lies in the figure of the Siren herself.

Victorian artists, particularly the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers, were particularly fond of painting women models as mythic or literary femme fatales.  A tradition of such depictions preceded Waterhouse, examples include Rossetti’s Ligeia, Beardsley’s Salome, Sandys’s Circe, or Burne-Jones’ Sidonia.  Each work is a poignant example of a society which viewed women with a mixture of Freudian fear and desire. The siren story often functioned as a trope for the terrifying moment of sexual realization, the terrible knowledge of the expulsion from Eden-like unity with the mother, in which the Siren ultimately symbolized a mixture of desire, danger and the unknown.  As Griselda Pollock wrote, “The conjunction of Eve, Venus, Madonna constitutes woman as an ambiguous sign, dangerous to man through knowledge, domination or sexuality, dreadfully distant, but anxiously desired, an almost hallucinatory presence” (G. Pollock, Vision and Difference, Routledge, London, 1988, p. 138).  The Siren is the ultimate hallucinatory presence, she is a legend, rarely scene, more often heard, and never taken as death precedes those who fall under her spell. 

In addition to Rossetti’s Ligeia, several other English Aesthetes painted the Siren story.  Leighton’s work, The Fisherman and the Siren (1856-1858) is an excellent earlier example of depicting the siren as a fin-tailed creature, rather than the bird-like woman described in the Odyssey.  The winged female becoming more of a mermaid most likely happened due to a mistranslation of one of the Greek texts. The Greek word for wing and fin is the same, pterughion, where as in Latin pennis and pinnis have only a different vowel separating them.  At some point the wings became fins, and, thus the mermaid was born.  Waterhouse was familiar with both interpretations by this point, most likely through Thomas Bullfinch’s popular 1855 Legends of Charlemagne, or Romance of the Middle Ages, in which the hero, Orlando, is accosted by mermaid-like sirens.

For Waterhouse, the shift to a siren with a fin tail was a natural progression from A Mermaid, a work that he had been painting intermittently for the past eight years.  Waterhouse placed the mermaid on a rock with a lyre, the attribute signifying the siren Ligeia, and created a heightened tension by eliminating the other sirens and sailors, leaving only the shipwrecked man entranced by the lone songstress.  The connection between the two figures, with its mixture of obsession, pity and desire became the hallmark of Waterhouse’s best paintings and his signature mark of style.