A Mermaid

When a painter was made a full member of the Royal Academy, London's official art establishment, tradition required him to hand over one work to keep in the building forever, a so-called diploma work. This is the one John William Waterhouse gave, finished in 1900. He had been circling the subject for eight years, since a first oil sketch in 1892, and the poem behind it is older still: Tennyson's The Mermaid, from 1830, about a creature combing her hair alone on a rock. By 1900 this kind of dreaming, literary picture was starting to look old-fashioned as newer, rougher styles arrived from the Continent. Waterhouse painted her anyway, seated on the shore, drawing a comb through her long hair with a scatter of shells at her side.