The Siren

The Siren, painted around 1900, depicts one of the ancient Greek sea-spirits whose song lured sailors to their deaths on rocks. Homer's Odyssey, Ovid, and classical mythology more broadly all contributed to the rich tradition of siren imagery that Waterhouse drew upon repeatedly in his career — most famously in the large-scale Ulysses and the Sirens (1891). Where that canvas showed the drama of Ulysses bound to the mast and his sailors stopping their ears, this work appears to focus on the siren herself as a single figure: beautiful, dangerous, and defined by her song and the sea. Waterhouse's siren fits into a wider Victorian iconography of the femme fatale — the beautiful woman whose very attractiveness constitutes her lethality.

A siren as solitary figure on rocks by the sea allows Waterhouse to combine his characteristic female figure with dramatic marine setting. The figure's combination of human and fish or bird characteristics — depending on the classical tradition followed — presents a compositional challenge he navigates through careful transition of form. Sea light, reflective and flickering, creates complex surface effects.